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The Spectator

14 November 2020 Aus

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Australia

Leading article Australia

It ain’t over ‘til it’s over

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have declared themselves the winners of the US presidential election; news which should fill many…

Australian Features

Features Australia

May I quota you?

Time leftists made way for other identity groups

Features Australia

The Marquess of Queens, buried not yet

Why should Trump throw in the towel? The blue corner didn’t

Features Australia

Peace nixed

Biden and Harris will plunge the Middle East back into darkness

Features Australia

Business/Robbery etc.

Treasury plans to fill the RBA’s interest rate vacuum Is it cause for alarm, or an inevitable trend, that the…

Features Australia

Zero net sense

Green commitments achieve nothing

Features Australia

Laughs on the way to the guillotine

The ABC is yet again mired in confusion and misinformation

Features Australia

Trump should be Biden his time

It’s not over ‘til SCOTUS sings

Features

Notes on...

The rise and fall of mink

Mink keeps you warm. That’s a most acceptable bonus, but its prime function is status. This week, however, the focus…

Features

The peerless social satire of Pont of Punch

The timeless brilliance of Pont of Punch

Features

The West has left Armenia to fend for itself

Armenians don’t want a deal – they want resolution

Features

Trump may have lost, but his agenda is here to stay

He may have lost – but his agenda is here to stay

Features

The questions we must ask about the Covid vaccine

The Covid vaccine still has a long way to go

Features

Macron is preparing for intellectual battle against Islamism

Muslim thinkers offer a remedy to fundamentalism

Features

Could ten million Covid tests a day get Britain back to normal?

Britain’s best hope isn’t a vaccine – it’s millions of daily tests

The Week

Letters

Letters: Why lockdown II was necessary

Cancelled procedures Sir: Your leader (‘A lockdown too far’, 7 November) suggests that the Prime Minister should have shown ‘leadership’…

Ancient and modern

Rome’s collegiate system was more logical than America's

So Humpty Trumpty has had his great fall. But how democratic or logical was his election in the first place…

Barometer

Open and shut case: how did lockdown affect shops?

Shot in the arm Global stock markets reached a new high after pharmaceutical firm Pfizer announced a vaccine it is…

Leading article

Boris won't be forgiven if he caves on Brexit now

It now looks increasingly likely that lockdown will end on 2 December, after all. The decision to impose further restrictions…

Diary

My post-election drink with Nigel Farage

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is a useful stop for journalists looking for some rust-belt Americana not too far from New York. The…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: Vaccine hopes up, Zoom shares down and Biden calls Boris

Home Pfizer and BioNTech announced a vaccine against Covid-19 of 90 per cent efficacy from two injections three weeks apart.…

Columnists

Any other business

China’s rockstar-of-tech has fallen foul of Xi

FTSE indices soared as the Biden Bounce met vaccine euphoria, underpinned by the Bank of England’s announcement of another £150…

Columns

What the three types of Trump supporter really want

As Democrats’ colossal collective sigh of relief drives wind turbines even over in Britain, let’s not lose sight of the…

The Spectator's Notes

The strangeness of voting in the Lords from my bed

Having only recently entered the House of Lords, I must tread with caution, but I had always understood that it…

Columns

Voters have lost their nerve

Elections teach us nothing. Instead, each tribe dredges succour from the minutiae, proving that they had been right all along.…

Columns

Will the vaccine revive Boris?

The first full week of the new national lockdown had the potential to be very difficult for Boris Johnson. Although…

Columns

It’s shameful how we have locked down our elderly

There’s a lot I don’t know about care home visits during this pandemic. I don’t know how straightforward it would…

Books

More from Books

Things mankind was not supposed to know — the dark side of science

One day someone is going to have to write the definitive study of Wikipedia’s influence on letters. What, after all,…

More from Books

The autistic mind could hold the key to the future

An old, cynical adage holds that ‘if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. I remembered…

More from Books

Masculinity in crisis: Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, reviewed

Masculinity, we are often told, is in crisis. The narrator of Men and Apparitions, Professor Ezekiel (Zeke) Stark, both studies…

More from Books

Humiliating the IRA was a fatal mistake

It was said that Reginald Maudling, as home secretary, once boarded a plane in Belfast and immediately requested a stiff…

More from Books

Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot

Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in…

More from Books

Gardening books for Christmas — reviewed by Ursula Buchan

Dan Pearson is one of the finest of all British garden designers, blessed with sensitivity, a wonderful eye, deep plant…

More from Books

Universities are supposed to encourage debate, not strangle it

Liberal values are under attack on two flanks. Those of us who think extensive freedom of expression, universal human rights…

More from Books

The courage of a madman: Maurice Wilson’s doomed assault on Everest

Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 14 of the planet’s peaks higher than 8,000 metres, is probably the…

More from Books

From light into darkness: the genius of Goya

The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was…

Lead book review

Books of the Year II — chosen by our regular reviewers

David Crane If nothing else, this has been a good time for catch-up. Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (translated by Walter…

Arts

Australian Arts

The Undoing

It’s a strange prospect for strange times, the young violinist Freya Franzen on the stage of Melbourne’s Concert Hall playing…

Culture Buff

Arthur Streeton Land of the Golden Fleece 1926

In February 1922, Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V and Queen Mary, was married in the first…

Classical

In defence of the tyrannical male maestro

Praising the grand old maestri of the podium isn’t a good look, as they say on Twitter. Conductors such as…

Arts feature

The journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood

Tanya Gold on the journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood

Theatre

Racists will love it: National Theatre's Death of England – Delroy reviewed

Death of England: Delroy is a companion piece to Death of England, which ran in February at the NT and…

Dance

I miss the faint hiss of a spinning foot: Royal Ballet – Live reviewed

Ballet lovers driven square-eyed by a drip feed of livestreaming and archive footage have been pining for the patter of…

The Listener

I’ve heard worse things — the death rattle of a close relative, for example: Kylie’s Disco reviewed

Grade: B– Uh-oh. Might have to be careful here, pull my punches a little bit. The editor is a big…

Radio

Boldly going where hundreds have gone before: Brave New Planet podcast reviewed

Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that…

Television

Did any of this actually happen? The Crown, season four, reviewed

‘We have to stop it now!’ says Princess Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), smoking another cigarette, obviously. She’s talking about the…

Cinema

A gripping portrait: Billie reviewed

This documentary about Billie Holiday is transfixing. Not just because it’s about Billie Holiday — I am not into jazz…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie Life & Language

Simon Collins A British newspaper once ran a TV ad extolling the virtues of journalistic objectivity. ‘Point of view’, which…

Chess

The Brick

I own a few chess books that could serve as a murder weapon, but none so hefty as Chess: 5334…

Competition

Spectator competition winners: poems for a qwerty keyboard

In Competition No. 3174 you were invited to write a poem in which each line begins with the letters A…

Drink

Drinking to the glories of Burns and follies of Boris

At least in London, midwinter spring has not been entirely vanquished, and the trees are still a couple of strong…

Real life

Where’s the slogan saying ‘Lose Weight. Stop Boozing. Survive the virus!’?

Panic at the country feed store. Panic in the horse and pony aisle. I wonder to myself: could life ever…

Low life

I was the only Trump supporter among the olive-pickers

We bums find ourselves sought after at this time of year to lend a hand with the olive harvest. So…

Crossword solution

2480: Warning - solution

Ten symmetrically placed unclued lights are synonyms for the warning ‘WATCH OUT’. First prize Andy Wallace, Ash Green, CoventryRunners-upCaroline Arms,…

High life

The cultural elite has a new enemy

New York Election night parties are usually dreadful affairs, with the idiot box blaring and hysterical listeners screaming out the…

The turf

Our Twelve to Follow have generated a record-breaking profit

First the company report. Readers who invested a tenner on the nose each time our Twelve to Follow for the…

The Wiki Man

The ludicrousness of stemmed wine glasses

In 1989 I answered my first mobile phone call on Oxford Street using a brick-sized Motorola borrowed from work. Several…

Bridge

Bridge | 14 November 2020

It’s been a busy week of bridge. First came the Lady Milne, the women’s home internationals. As the host nation,…

Mind your language

What’s the difference between ‘gifting’ and ‘giving’?

Boris Johnson, the Telegraphsuggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers…

Chess puzzle

No. 630

White to play. Mista–Kloza, Poland 1955 (supposedly). Which move does White play to force a quick checkmate? Answers should be…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: How do I cope with cooking for food snobs?

Q. I have a delightful young goddaughter who, thanks to the virus, I have not seen since last year. Her…

No sacred cows

Will my kids report me for hate speech?

When Humza Yousaf, the SNP’s cabinet secretary for justice, announced that his new Hate Crime Bill would remove the ‘dwelling…

Crossword

2483: In my soup

Unclued lights are defined by extra words in ten clues and are anagrams of ten of a kind. Elsewhere, ignore…