‘Is it heartening for you to see someone like anti-immigration Pauline doing well in Australia?’ asked the Channel Nine journalist.…

Any normal person would know that at my advanced age and imminent senility, the last thing I should be doing…

The tobacco excise is today’s window tax

Rage against the machine (Florence)

From a victim of crime

Or lose again

The PM’s grasp of reality is like the Gulf of Hormuz – it doesn’t exist

So let’s not panic in the face of populism

Populism simply means popular

The right wins big – and could also soon in France

On the morning of the 2005 general election, the young man who sat opposite me at work asked, ‘How did…

Twenty years ago, as America fought in the Middle East, a junior Democratic senator from the Midwest, a forty-something man…

On 1 September, Andy Burnham gathered Labour MPs in No. 10 for a rousing speech. ‘We are a fighting force,’…

MournMate is a new online market-place that promises to connect bereaved families and funeral homes with professional mourners in the…

Behind the scenes of The Spectator’s wealth tax debate this month there were lots of nervous whispers. ‘Wealthy people we…

Last spring, a Chinese icebreaker turned up in the tropical waters of Palau. That was after Chinese research vessels arrived…

While last week’s majority vote by the inhabitants of Piddington in Oxfordshire to seek independence from Britain was a stunt…

The August 2004 cover of Playboy features a topless Eva Herzigova (‘The supermodel is supernaked’) and promises a piece about…

So far, Andy Burnham’s premiership has been characterised by compromise and obfuscation. When choosing his Chancellor, instead of picking Shabana…

‘Journalling’ is now a good thing, which we know because it’s part of Bryan Johnson’s morning routine, sandwiched between eating…

If Gary Lineker wants to convert his footballing OBE into something better reflecting his wealth, he will have to try…

Poll positions Lord Kinnock called on Andy Burnham to make voting compulsory. Around 24 countries have some kind of compulsory…

Reform’s high bar Sir: Michael Gove’s concerns about Reform lacking the talent and an adequate policy framework to ‘prove their…

If Andy Burnham wants a reminder of the case for artificial intelligence (AI), he need only walk down the streets…

I’ve always admired Diane Abbott, though admittedly only for one thing. Many years ago the MP for Hackney North and…

As Labour meet in Liverpool, from Sunday, Andy Burnham and his advisers are worrying about his lack of a mandate.…

In late July, when roughly 72,000 migrants stormed the tiny Spanish enclave in North Africa, Ceuta (thanks to which I…

‘Father Time always wins,’ 96-year-old Warren Buffett told shareholders as he retired last week from the chair of Berkshire Hathaway,…

I’m sort of in awe of Ed Davey. How does he still manage to wake up every day and, despite…

We think we know the story of our own classic staples, says Lewis Bassett, but ‘there is clearly a lot of romanticism at work when we talk about tradition’

Set in Mandate-era Palestine, Faulks’s timely novel presents the region’s problems as a Gordion knot, with anti-Semitism ‘at the root of everything’

Charles Spicer reminds us of the courage of the early aviators who graduated from the trenches to face new horrors in ‘spinning incinerators’ and crushing forced landings

Enthusiasm for the game saw cricket played on ice or in ankle-deep mud – by fathers against sons, the bearded against the barefaced, and even by the one-armed against the one-legged

As great ship-stuck-in-ice-disasters go, that of the Karluck in 1913 has few equals in its quest of a polar Atlantis

Believing she has incurable cancer, Esther Luck arranges her suicide by proxy. But her obliging accomplice misfires disastrously

With their finely drawn symbols for hedges, fences, ‘gentlemen’s seats’ and letterboxes, the first maps gave the intimacies of landscape a cosy storybook intensity

In the torrid summer of 1381, Wat Tyler, the charismatic leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, assumes he is headed for hell

Science is never settled, says Carlo Rovelli, and in his essay on quantum mechanics even asserts that certainty is ‘uninteresting’

Protestant evangelicalism, avarice and the promotion of family fortunes were what chiefly characterised both ill-fated statesmen

Sometimes cultural news is just bad news. Everyone was delighted at the thought that Joanna Murray-Smith’s Switzerland was being turned…

Golden Boy, written by Clifford Odets in 1937, feels like a Norman Wisdom movie. A talented boxer wants to become…

There are many ways for an established act or artist to call it a day. Some implode mid-tour in a…

Georgia Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility, which advertises itself as ‘a fresh take for a fresh generation’, has its work cut…

Watercolours can be fatal for your standing in the art world. ‘As soon as you say you paint in watercolour,’…

The podcast audio-drama Sherlock & Co. is an updated version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in which the great…

No critic sets out to be a reactionary, even though it’s much easier that way. There’s no real satisfaction in…

‘I probably got a one or two seconds look at him before he delivered the first blow,’ recalls Sir Salman…

Which saddened you more: the 25th anniversary of the mass murder of 3,000 civilians, including ten Australians, or the death…

They keep inventing them, don’t they? New expressions we didn’t have before, and I’m not entirely persuaded we need now!…

Provence ‘Would you like to meet Eric Idle? Don’t worry, he and his wife Tania are smashing.’ This was 2009.…

I think I know why Rolls-Royce names its cars for the spirit world. They are called Ghost (the saloon, though…

You know what, I was looking forward to Reform’s party conference in Birmingham. Up there as a journalist, not a…

It was early December 1973 and I remember my grandmother asking, ‘What would you most like for Christmas?’ I knew…

I come out of my ayurvedic massage in Kerala all oily. I look like one of those sad birds you…

Everyone knows the rules. London invented trains that run underground as well as the protocol that makes the system bearable.…

Comp. 3468 took as its jumping-off point Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario and invited you to submit a poem proposing…

One of the drawbacks of being a Tory peer is that when I’m asked to give a talk or participate…

Q. I am a lifelong fan of J.K. Rowling’s work. I have read and watched everything she’s written and am…