The Spectator
1 October 2016 Aus
Aussie Mussies
Australia
Malcolm (never to be released)
Malcolm Turnbull should surrender his passport and never again be allowed to leave these shores, at least while he is…
Australian Columnists
Consider This
The WHO is a closed shop ‘I for my part am convinced that the day will come when international health…
Diary of a parliamentary nobody
Upon debut as a columnist some explanatory notes are surely in order. Like the American columnist George F. Will I…
Australian Features
Aussie Mussies
There have been few developments to better illustrate the collective delusions of the progressive media and the Islamic community than…
Baiting greyhound owners
Greyhound racing is to be outlawed in NSW from July 1, purportedly based on the findings of the McHugh report,…
Technical nightmare
Surely Malcolm Williamson represented the ultimate process of career self-destruction possible in a culture which had never experienced suicide-bombers. When…
Them’s fighting words
First speeches are one of the few times Parliamentarians can present their motivations to the Chamber. After a precarious election…
All sizzle, no sausage
During a recent policy debate concerning the proposal to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our Constitution, a…
The Empire fries back
Memo to self: If I ever decide to flirt with the shoals of bankruptcy and follow friends’ calls to ‘open…
Features
In search of Mayism
What does Theresa May believe? The new Prime Minister has had the summer to settle into her job and has…
The May machine
Theresa May isn’t much given to shows of emotion. When Andrea Leadsom called her to concede in the Tory leadership…
Doctor’s orders
Second acts in British politics are vanishingly rare these days and Liam Fox, restored to the cabinet by Theresa May,…
May’s beard
This week, the Tory party conference ought to be gripped by the question, who the hell is Nick Timothy, the…
Of rats and men
‘I really, really hate rats,’ Sir David Attenborough has boasted. ‘If a rat appears in a room, I have to…
New York Notebook
The first presidential debate was a disappointment. Half an hour into the big Trump-Clinton show on Long Island, many among…
Croatia
Advocates of New Zealand often boast that the country is like Britain was in the 1950s. This is all well…
The Week
Portrait of the week
Home Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary, said that Britain would oppose attempts to create an EU army, as it…
Let the right ones in
As the UK prepares for Brexit into the big wide world outside, it has been pointed out that the Foreign…
Serpent of mud
From ‘The fall of Combles and Thiepval’, The Spectator, 30 September 1916: The trench — ugly, dirty, dull, untidy serpent…
Deadly silence
There was a time when the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo would have featured strongly in political debate in Britain. Just…
Australian letters
Slow boats Sir: I hope Rod Liddle seeks therapy vis-a-vis that terrifying penis that haunts him (‘Haunted by an honourable…
Columnists
The Spectator’s Notes
Mathias Döpfner, the extremely tall, extremely intelligent head of Axel Springer, is unusual in the generally conformist German business elite…
Let’s bring the wolves back into Britain
A year ago there was a confirmed sighting, and even film, of a wild wolf in the Netherlands for the…
We know who Theresa May is against. But who is she for?
One of the professional drawbacks of coming from Scotland and then moving to London is that I don’t really know…
Let the metropolitan elite lead the way
How does one join the Liberal Metro-politan Elite? What should be the qualifications? I must be an LME member because…
If Deutsche Bank goes down without a bailout, I really will eat my hat
‘Can anyone seriously imagine the German state and corporate establishment allowing the bank that bears their country’s name to go…
Books
Cocktails, castles and cadging
Here is a veritable feast for fans of Paddy Leigh Fermor. This is the story of a well-lived life through…
The art of listening
Rachel Cusk is a writer who provokes strong reactions in her readers, and her critical reputation has swung wildly in…
All work, many plays
‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little…
Knight’s tale
In The Cousins’ War (1999), the Republican political strategist Kevin Phillips argued that three ‘civil wars’ had defined politics in…
Frankly impenetrable
One day in April 1969 Theodor Adorno began teaching a new course entitled ‘An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’. Feel free,…
Recent crime fiction
There are two people in a prison cell: Frank and Hal. One of them is a member of a spy…
The fallen Angel
Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who…
Untold tales of Tibet
On the night of 17 March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, aged 23, slipped out of the Norbulinka, his summer…
Body and soul
Emma Donoghue’s novel Room was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize and made into a film in 2015. Inspired…
The curse of Mr Kurtz
Marie Darrieussecq shot to literary fame in France when her bestselling debut, Pig Tales (1996), was a finalist for the…
Arts
American beauty
‘At last,’ wrote Patrick Heron, a British painter, in 1956, ‘we can see for ourselves what it is to stand…
Kevin Jackson as Nijinsky
In 1981, at the Sydney Theatre Company, we presented a stylish production of Chinchilla, a play by Robert David MacDonald…
Hilarious, puzzling, boring
No Man’s Land isn’t quite as great as its classic status suggests. At first sight the script is a bit…
Bach to basics
The churning, rheumatic mechanism of a harpsichord — notes needling your ears like drops of acid rain — doesn’t necessarily…
Breaking up is hard to do
’Will you be dancing?’ the man in front asks his friend before the lights go down. ‘Most likely,’ she says.…
Losing heart
The subtitle for Mozart’s Così fan tutte may be ‘The School For Lovers’, but it’s as a school for directors…
There’s something about Mary
Music likes to tell the same story over and over again. This is part of its tradition but even individual…
Close encounters of the Eighties kind
Stranger Things is the most delightful, gripping, charming, nostalgic, compulsive, edge-of-seat entertainment I’ve had in ages. Like a lot of…
One day in November
The weather was ‘treacherous’ on Saturday, 23 November 2013, the day chosen randomly by Gary Younge as the focus for…
White Knight
Free State of Jones is an American Civil War drama ‘inspired’ by the life of Newton Knight, who led an…
Life
2280: Acorns
The unclued lights are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. Ignore one apostrophe. Across 1 Top for one dining…
Eddie Howe for England
The name of Jozef Venglos won’t mean much to most of us apart from a few Aston Villa completists with…
No. 428
Black to play. This position is a variation from Gelfand-Mamedyarov, Tal Memorial Blitz 2016. Black has various strong moves but…
I know an anti-Tory pact won’t work
I appeared on Radio 4 with Shirley Williams recently and as we were leaving I asked her if she thought…
Pens, sex and potatoes
I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs Gaskell…
Rigan wizard
Mikhail Tal, the Wizard from Riga, was one of the most devastating tacticians in the history of chess. His rise…
If
In Competition No. 2967 you were invited to submit an article written by the author of your choice under the…
2277: Royalty
The theme word is KING and the pairs are 4/41, 14/1A, 19/27, 34/16 and 38/24. First prize C.V. Clark, London…
The Battle for Britain
The post The Battle for Britain appeared first on The Spectator.
Ash
Home is where the heart is, but some poor languages have no word for ‘home’. For them, home is where…