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The Spectator

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Wong again

Warning, satire: In international news this week, the Israeli government has announced it plans to send a special envoy to…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Vandalism of the decolonisers

Australia’s rich cultural history is being deliberately destroyed

Features Australia

Time to rein in the NDIS

However worthy, this scheme is out of control on costings

Features Australia

Don’t Giggle when they Tickle

Gender re-education no laughing matter

Features Australia

Unreal, man!

Will this latest piece of digital wizardry simply make us lonelier?

Features

Features

The truth about ‘boardroom diversity’

We all know that increasing the diversity of your boardroom increases the success of your company because politicians, business leaders…

Features

The abortion debate returns

I don’t like talking about abortion and so rarely do. I have never written about it before. I am uncomfortable…

Features

I want to see a doctor – not do another NHS survey

Nye Bevan did not make old bones, and perhaps that’s just as well. According to a recent British Social Attitudes…

Features

Will Biden support Ukraine’s attacks on Russia?

This time last year, Volodymyr Zelensky was touring western capitals, calling for weapons and money to launch a decisive summer…

Features

Macron vs Putin: this summer’s Olympic battle

Dixmont, Yonne Last summer, Emmanuel Macron lashed out at France’s constitution because it prevents him from running for a third…

Features

Women don’t want women-only clubs

In my experience, men offer this infuriating comeback when challenged about the continuing exclusion of women from clubs such as…

Features

Farewell, Voyager 1

Some time soon we will have to say farewell to our most distant emissary – the Voyager 1 spacecraft. After…

Notes on...

City folk go wild for wild garlic

For a certain type of Barbour-clad middle-aged man, the best time of year is late summer, and the arrival of…

The Week

Letters

Letters: the real problem with a Labour super-majority

Good trade-off Sir: I applaud your excellent editorial (‘Trading in Falsehoods’, 6 April) – a succinct and insightful essay on…

Barometer

Who uses Grindr?

Meet market Who uses the gay dating app Grindr? – The site claims 27m users worldwide, 80.5% of whom identify…

Ancient and modern

Were the Greeks right about justice?

The Sentencing Council, consisting of various legal authorities, has told judges and magistrates to consider, when sentencing the young, their…

Leading article

Common sense prevails in the gender debate

The publication this week of the Cass Review into gender-identity services for young people marks a welcome return to reason…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the Week: Tory phishing, tension over Rafah and Cameron in America

Home The review by Dr Hilary Cass of gender-identity services for people under 18 called for an end to prescribing…

Diary

In defence of the EU

Eastern Europe is the graveyard of empires. Rome failed on the Danube, Napoleon on the Dnieper. The epic struggle between…

Columnists

Columns

A new survey that may be of interest

My favourite opinion polls are those which elicit enormous shock in the population for stating something everybody knew for ages,…

Columns

Israel is running out of options

There are many misunderstandings about Israel in the international media, but one of the most bewildering is the suggestion that…

Columns

Is Trump or Biden a bigger threat to democracy?

When more than two-thirds of the American electorate doesn’t want to vote for either major party’s nominee, a third party…

Columns

Is Cameron upstaging Sunak?

The logic behind Rishi Sunak’s decision to make David Cameron foreign secretary was that he would be a ‘big beast’…

The Spectator's Notes

Why do MPs send nude pictures of themselves?

Adam Dyster has gone to work for the shadow Defra secretary Steve Reed. I admit this is not an appointment…

Any other business

The arrogance of Apple

Can flexible working get the best out of what a ministerial press release calls ‘hardworking Brits’ – or is it…

Columns

What is there left to say about the Tories?

Spare a thought for us political commentators. We stare into the void between now and a (presumed) decisive Labour victory…

Books

More from Books

Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed

Thomas tells her tale of a hellish honeymoon on a Greek island with the cunning of an Aegean sorceress, keeping her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert

Lead book review

We must never lose the treasured Orkneys

Fertile fields and spectacular sea stacks are matched by an extraordinarily rich, dramatic history. No wonder the islands have been so celebrated for centuries

More from Books

There’s nothing shameful about hypochondria

Caroline Crampton describes the real agonies of people obsessed with their fragility, revealing that her own hypochondria stems from a childhood cancer diagnosis

More from Books

Adrift on the Canadian frontier: The Voyageur, by Paul Carlucci, reviewed

Based on the 19th-century ‘voyageur’ Alexis de Martin, Carlucci’s young protagonist is befriended by kindly strangers. But what are their true motives?

More from Books

English civil law has become a luxury good beyond the reach of most of us

Tom Burgis makes this painfully clear in his account of the long hounding of the former MP Charlotte Leslie by the vengeful millionaire Mohamed Amersi

More from Books

Are we finally beginning to understand gravity?

Claudia de Rham explores the true nature of this fundamental force as she struggles against received wisdom to get a new theory of ‘massive gravity’ recognised

More from Books

Eighty years on, the planning of Operation Neptune remains awesome

The seaborne invasion went so smoothly, it might have been thought plain-sailing. But that was far from the truth. Nick Hewitt describes the meticulous forethought that preceded it

More from Books

Harping on the music of our ancestors

From a series of mysterious objects – ‘flower flutes’, inscriptions, ‘little black things like beetles’ wing cases’ – Graeme Lawson conjures the haunting melodies of the past

More from Books

Scrawled outpourings of love and defiance

Examples of 18th-century graffiti range from romantic rhymes scratched on windowpanes to the haunting marks of political prisoners incised on dungeon walls

More from Books

London’s dark underbelly: Caledonian Road, by Andrew O’Hagan, reviewed

With its vast cast and twisting plot, O’Hagan’s complex novel feels as busy and noisy as the north London thoroughfare of its title

More from Books

What we owe to the self-taught genius Carl Linnaeus

Bumptious, uncouth and the despair of his schoolmasters, Linnaeus died almost forgotten. Yet he established a system of taxonomy that we still use two centuries later

Arts

Australian Arts

Somersaulting beauty of the songmaker

It’s uncanny sometimes how it works. There we were last Saturday in Hamer Hall to hear what Stephen Layton from…

Cinema

Better than expected (but my expectations were low): Back to Black reviewed

When the trailer for Sam Taylor-Johnson’s biopic of Amy Winehouse, Back to Black, first landed, her fans were gracious. ‘This,’…

Radio

I’m ashamed that I used to think ABBA wasn’t cool

One of the joys of listening to archive BBC interviews with pop stars is the chance to hear long-discarded hipster…

Television

Grey, gloomy, and utterly joyless: Ripley reviewed

If you’ve spent any time gawping at Netflix over the past half-decade or so, you’ll already know that human culture…

Classical

What would Tanner say?

On the train home from the Royal Festival Hall I learned of the death of Michael Tanner, who wrote this…

Pop

The mayhem ‘Born Slippy’ provoked felt both poignant and cathartic: Underworld, at Usher Hall, reviewed

On the same night Underworld played the second of two shows at the Usher Hall, next door at the Traverse…

Classical

In defence of noise music

It’s curious to consider what a venerable old thing noise music is. That this most singularly untameable of musics –…

Arts feature

The tumultuous story behind Caravaggio’s last painting

For centuries no one knew who it was by or even what it was of. The picture that had hung…

Theatre

Why has the National engaged in this tedious act of defamation of the Brontës?

The Divine Mrs S is a backstage satire set in the year 1800, when flouncy costumes and elaborate English prose…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

It’s been a long time since the beer garden of the iconic Oaks Hotel in Sydney’s Neutral Bay lost all…

Aussie Life

Language

We all know what it means when someone is said to have been ‘thrown under the bus’ by their colleagues…

Drink

The glory of German wines

I have had three recent conversations, all lively if unrelated – and all well lubricated. The first concerned Anglo-Saxon England…

Real life

Will I ever get my HRT?

The novelty of living in a place where a policeman called Ambrose lives in a house whose door you can…

No sacred cows

My father’s greatest act of kindness

I’ve been busy planning a trip to New Zealand and Australia. I’ll be gone for about five weeks from mid-June,…

The Wiki Man

There are three sides to every story

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who died last month aged 90, was perhaps most famous for his dictum that: ‘Nothing in…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: should I encourage guests to strip their beds?

Q. Our son, 17, who is generally a credit to us, has started eating with his mouth open. It’s the…

Mind your language

We ought to banish more words

Why do people say: ‘You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment’? Are they using it as they…

Bridge

Bridge | 13 April 2024

I’ve been waiting for what feels like decades to make a contract by means of an intra-finesse. And not just…

City life

My life of genteel poverty

Every year at the beginning of April, I tell myself I must top up my Isa before the 5 April…