lockdown

How would we handle an avian flu pandemic?

20 July 2024 9:00 am

Concerns have been raised in recent months after an outbreak of avian flu caused by the virus H5N1 was detected…

What’s really behind the Tories’ present woes?

25 May 2024 9:00 am

Geoffrey Wheatcroft identifies two root causes: the disastrous revision of the leadership election procedure, and David Cameron’s turn to the referendum as a device to govern

Musings in lockdown: The Vulnerables, by Sigrid Nunez, reviewed

20 January 2024 9:00 am

Marooned in Manhattan with a stoned student and precocious parrot for company, our elderly narrator despairs of the novel’s future when life is so much stranger than fiction

Ménage à trois: Day, by Michael Cunningham, reviewed

13 January 2024 9:00 am

When Dan, his wife Isabel and her brother Robbie decide to spend lockdown together, claustrophobic domesticity develops into a painful love triangle

Sex and the Famous Five

9 December 2023 9:00 am

Before drawing tenuous comparisons between Enid Blyton and David Bowie, Nicholas Royle invites us to consider the erotic potential of Timmy the dog

TikTok is giving our children Tourette’s

9 September 2023 9:00 am

The pandemic has hit our children even harder than we thought

Covid and the politics of panic

3 June 2023 9:00 am

It is 15 months since Sweden’s Coronavirus Commission presented its final report. The 770-page document analysed how the country handled…

Who gets to decide what is ‘harmful’?

13 May 2023 9:00 am

Three years ago this week marked my first misgivings about the government’s Covid lockdown. Sure, I was late to that…

Communing with an ancestor

13 May 2023 9:00 am

Ian Marchant, diagnosed with cancer in 2020, takes comfort from his ancestor’s diary (1714-28), recording a full life as farmer and mainstay of his parish

Liz Truss can’t ignore the issue of NHS reform

10 September 2022 9:00 am

It’s hard to think of any Prime Minister who has entered office surrounded by such low expectations. Liz Truss was…

Letters: Why we obeyed lockdown

10 September 2022 9:00 am

Why we allowed it Sir: In her article ‘Why didn’t more people resist lockdown?’ (3 September), Lionel Shriver partially answers…

Vaccines disguised the errors of our lockdown policy

4 September 2022 4:00 pm

Liz Truss’s statement that she would never authorise another lockdown and The Spectator’s interview with Rishi Sunak have triggered a…

Letters: Lockdown saved lives

3 September 2022 9:00 am

Lockdown saved lives Sir: Rishi Sunak presents an alarming picture of what happened during lockdown (‘The lockdown files’, 27 August)…

Why didn’t more people resist lockdown?

3 September 2022 9:00 am

Last week’s Spectator interview with Rishi Sunak conveyed the anti-science ‘science’, the paucity of even fag-packet cost-benefit analysis and the…

How science became politicised

3 September 2022 9:00 am

Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers across the world…

What Rishi Sunak gets wrong about lockdown

1 September 2022 4:45 pm

Rishi Sunak presents an alarming picture of what happened during lockdown in last week’s Spectator interview – one echoed by…

We’re at pandemic levels of death. Why is no one talking about it?

23 August 2022 9:10 pm

At the peak of the lockdowns, thousands were dying every week. Newspaper front pages demanded action. But in the latest…

Bloated waffle: Jitney at the Old Vic reviewed

25 June 2022 9:00 am

The Old Vic’s new show, Jitney, has a mystifying YouTube advert which gives no information about the play or the…

Sheila Hancock takes pride in her irascibility

11 June 2022 9:00 am

This book begins with Sheila Hancock wondering why she is being offered a damehood. I must say I slightly wondered…

Welcome to the age of post-Covid nihilism

8 June 2022 8:59 pm

Washington, DC Amid the recent orgy of violence across America, it was the carjackings that finally got me. Lost amid all…

Boris Johnson’s guilt

28 May 2022 9:00 am

An ability to survive narrow scrapes has been one of Boris Johnson’s defining qualities. The pictures of Downing Street’s lockdown…

The truth about Britain’s Covid deaths

14 May 2022 9:00 am

There has been a considerable hoo-hah in the press about the recent World Health Organisation report estimating Covid-related deaths internationally…

Male friendship is in crisis

9 April 2022 9:00 am

The decline of male friendship

Boris Johnson and the partygate hangover

2 April 2022 9:00 am

Afew weeks ago it seemed that the issue of Downing Street parties over lockdown had been usurped by a more…