Racism
High life
Serena Williams, according to some commentators the greatest woman who has ever graced this earth of ours, will complete the…
Migrant
Al Jazeera, the Qatari broadcaster, is going to use refugee instead of migrant in its English output. ‘The umbrella term…
Don’t act white, act migrant
Black British boys are being held back by fear of betraying their background. Immigrant children know how to deal with that
A twinge of fear, and a glimpse of a harsher world
I celebrated Eid in a sandy bay in Sri Lanka, watching from the warm, shallow sea as gaggles of local…
Barometer
Ties that bind Lewis Hamilton was ejected from the royal box at Wimbledon for not wearing a tie. Some places…
A bad novel on the way to a good one
Philip Hensher on the tangled history of To Kill a Mockingbird’s much-anticipated ‘sequel’
Tax return
Make no mistake: the Proms, whose 2015 season was launched last night, would not, could not, exist without the BBC,…
The questions you don’t ask at the BBC
There was a remarkable scene in one BBC Today programme morning meeting in about 1995, as all the producers gathered…
High life
When I founded the American Conservative 13 years ago — the purpose being to shine a light on the neocon…
Migrants face many dangers. Are we one of them?
A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a…
Hope against hope
At the eye of apartheid South Africa’s storm of insanities was a mania for categorisation. Everything belonged in its place,…
Snow White or black beauty?
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it…
‘The truth is hard’
Roger Scruton on why we’re losing the battle for western civilisation
Liberal absolutism may be the worst kind of all
This week I would like you to share the deep pain of a liberal who has been called ‘right-wing’. This…
Teenage kicks
Journalist, novelist, broadcaster and figurehead of British feminism Caitlin Moran, who writes most of the Times and even had her…
Why I may bail out the Guardian
One of the highlights of my week comes on a Saturday morning, when I make myself a cup of fair-trade…
The new PC from A to Z
Anyone who thought political correctness had croaked, joining neon leg warmers, mullets and MC Hammer in the graveyard of bad…
Stealing a march
Selma, the civil rights film that stars David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, undoubtedly contains the best and most powerful…
Coloured
Benedict Cumberbatch apologised at length: ‘devastated’, ‘shaming’, ‘offended’, ‘inappropriate’. What had he done? Been caught in a compromising situation or…
Dirty dancing
Vienna’s New Year’s Day concert is still tarnished by its Nazi origins, says Norman Lebrecht
Without patriotism, there’s no civilisation
Is it racist to be patriotic? Is patriotism, by definition, small-minded and exclusive? When you strip away the onion layers…
The dark secrets that your clicks reveal
About four years ago, an irate father in Minneapolis walked into his local Target shop with a complaint. He wanted…
Hug a hoodie?
The Ku Klux Klan is trying to rebrand
Let the right ones in
It is the easiest thing in the world to say who should come to Britain and why. But if there…
How to fight Ukip
In the 2005 general election this magazine supported the Conservatives, with one exception — we urged voters in Medway not to…
