The Spectator
30 March 2024 Aus
In defence of forgiveness
Australia
Hamas resurrected?
The duplicity and the cynicism of the Biden administration knows no bounds. By choosing to abstain from a Chinese/Russian-sponsored UN…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
I hope you will allow me, just for this week, to mention an essentially personal matter. On 19 March, I…
Australian Features
It’s your white guilt, not my white privilege
The West need not apologise for colonialism
Features
How Ukraine plans to revive its birth rate
In my village in Ukraine, there aren’t many families left intact. The funerals of those who have been killed in…
Why I’m fighting to ban smartphones for children
I am not often lost for words, but the five middle-aged homeless men who spoke at the Big Issue celebration…
In defence of forgiveness
It is often the small constants in the culture that give the game away. Much of the news today is…
The utter horror of UHT milk
On a trip to Italy via Paris last month, my travelling companion and I went to the Gare de Lyon…
The Week
Why the fuss over The Spectator’s sale?
This diary is late. Two months late. The columnists who missed my Evening Standard deadlines often had elaborate excuses. Mine…
Columnists
British families deserve a tax break
I am delighted to report that some £800,000 of taxpayers’ money is to be spent ‘remediating’ the works of Robert…
Books
Stories of the Sussex Downs
Focusing on a 20-mile square of West Sussex, Alexandra Harris explores its rich history, from the wreck of a Viking longboat to a refuge for French Resistance agents
The horrors of the Eastern Front
Nick Lloyd reinforces Churchill’s sentiment that the first world war in the East was ‘one of the most frightful misfortunes to befall mankind’
Why today’s youth is so anxious and judgmental
In a well-evidenced diatribe, Jonathan Haidt accuses the creators of smartphone culture of rewiring childhood and changing human development on an unimaginable scale
On the road with Danny Lyon
The celebrated photojournalist describes his peripatetic youth recording revolution in Haiti, hunger and homelessness in Mexico and the civil rights movement in the US
Caught in a Venus flytrap: Red Pyramid, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed
Sorokin’s satirical stories are not for the fainthearted, but there are few more dedicated critics of Russia's infinite bureaucracy writing fiction today
Resolute, dignified and intelligent: Elizabeth II inspired loyalty from the start
Alexander Larman describes how, from 1945 onwards, the House of Windsor set about rebranding itself after a decade of crisis both internal and external
The world’s largest flower is also its ugliest
Known as ‘corpse flower’, the sinister Rafflesia resembles slabs of bloody, white-flecked meat, emits the scent of rotting flesh and eventually subsides into a mass of black slime
How country living changed the lives of three remarkable women writers
Harriet Baker describes how Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann found new forms of peace and creativity away from the stifling capital
Arts
Did he/didn’t he?
Good witches and witches dubbed bad and born green. Wicked is one of those pieces of musical theatre that will…
Life
Aussie life
Memory is tricky. Wandering the Paris end of Collins street sipping espresso, waving to paroled Extinction Rebellion protesters, and thinking…
Language
We wordsmiths have a principle that ‘a text without a context is a pretext’. This matters because of what some…