The Spectator
23 September 2023 Aus
Own goalie
Australia
Own goalie
As this magazine pointed out last week, there is no room for complacency in the fight to defeat the referendum…
Australian Features
The road ahead for a country on the precipice
Democracy disappearing in New Zealand
Britain’s coppers clown show
Progressive ideology has turned UK law enforcement into a woke farce
Features
The enormity of the migrant crisis will upend European politics
The enormity of the migrant crisis will upend European politics
The simplicity and joy of recorded conversations
The simplicity and joy of audio recordings
The exiled activists who dream of dismantling the Russian empire
The dream of the dismantling of the Russian empire
125,000 Hong Kongers have come to the UK. Where are they?
125,000 have come to Britain. Where are they?
Inside the fastest growing – and shrinking – churches in the UK
While most congregations shrink, a few are growing fast
Parent trap: the relentless rise of children’s speaker Yoto
Yoto, the technological babysitter
Snus
As the government considers banning disposable vapes because they are thought to appeal to children, it is worth reflecting on…
The Week
Rishi Sunak is right to reconsider his green pledges
The old carmakers were slow to realise the potential of electric cars and didn’t innovate. So Elon Musk, an internet…
Portrait of the week
Home Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, proposed reaching net zero in 2050 ‘in a better, more proportionate way’ such as by…
Elizabeth Hurley deserves a damehood
With the boiling, broiling summer here in Provence now at an end, it’s time to start thinking about rehearsing for…
Argue away
Excited crowds of youth, encouraged by adults who should know better, take the view that opinions with which they disagree…
Columnists
Sunak’s new strategy: hard truths
The last time Tory activists and MPs gathered for their annual party conference, it didn’t end well. Liz Truss had…
The Spectator’s Notes
In 2014, Rolf Harris was convicted of sexual offences against girls. I wrote in this space that this would have…
The inequality of sex
As we all shroud ourselves in grief at being unable to watch Russell Brand any more on terrestrial television stations,…
Politicians can’t win on illegal migration
It is eight years now since The Spectator sent me to Lampedusa to see the boats coming in. That was…
Shoplifters need to feel shame
This is my brother’s story and, like many telling stories, it’s small. Tim lives in Iowa, as our mother’s family…
Australia’s disastrous indigenous voice referendum
My partner and I have just returned from the most magical trip. As guests of Western Australia’s tourist board we’ve…
The lesson of Looney: every board should prepare for scandal
Bernard Looney, the fallen BP chief, always had a certain swagger about him. I’ve no idea whether he was unsafe…
Books
The bloody prequel: a triumphant new translation of the Iliad
Following her translation of the Odyssey, Emily Wilson has turned her hand to the Iliad – and it is a triumph, writes A.E. Stallings
A world of your own
How the search for a birthday present led to the founding of a unique business
Brutality rules in paradise – a memoir of Jamaican childhood
Brought up by a tyrannical father in the postcard beauty of Montego Bay, this is a story of the author’s salvation through literature and the ferocity of maternal love
Joan Didion deserves better
The great American writer is ill-served by this new biography – but luckily we still have her own writing to tell us who she truly was
The big picture: two books on artists and their lives
Essays by Michael Peppiatt on the artists who quicken his heart, and encounters between Richard Cork and his favourites, including Jasper Johns, Henry Moore and Gilbert & George
‘I glimpse her ahead of me’ – a solo female traveller follows her hero across Turkey
Gertrude Bell travelled extensively through Turkey before and after the first world war and the author plays dogged detective in her wake
The chase looms large in the best new thrillers
It’s a brilliant page-turner device and works perfectly in stories set variously during the Algerian war of independence of the 1950s and Norfolk and London in the present day
Vivid, gripping and surreal: a new slice of Ellroy madness
A labyrinthine plot involving Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedy clan form the basis of the latest in James Ellroy’s planned new ‘LA Quintet’
Hail dairy
A lifetime obsession with milk has resulted in 350 numbered, lightly edited and loosely connected remarks about milk, its colour, its smell and much else. Weird or what?
How do authors’ gardens inspire them?
A sumptuous coffee-table book in which writers from Henry James to Frances Hodgson Burnett are briefly glimpsed while passing through the beautiful spaces that outlast them
By hook or by crook
Anne Henderson has produced a series of important books on the Menzies era. Her latest volume adds to this considerable…
Arts
The dazzling classic The Red Shoes has several unfashionable lessons for us today
Seventy-five years after its release, Powell and Pressburger’s dazzling, much-loved classic is more timely than ever, says Robin Ashenden
Wagner rewilded: Das Rheingold, at the Royal Opera House, reviewed
In Northern Ireland Opera’s new Tosca, the curtain rises on a big concrete dish from which a pair of eyes…
Cheesy skit: A Mirror, at the Almeida Theatre, reviewed
The playwright Sam Holcroft likes to toy with dramatic conventions and to tease her audiences by withholding key information about…
Menacingly entertaining thriller, despite the clichés: A Lesson reviewed
The Lesson is a literary thriller that is occasionally heavy-handed but also menacingly entertaining, plus you get Richard E. Grant…
If you can’t get something out of the songs of Shania Twain, you’re a lost cause
Pop critics routinely make the mistake of assuming the most important acts are the ones copied by the groups they…
In praise of the Festival Song – the four-minute wonder that can sustain a career for decades
As the sun sets on another too-long summer festival season, let us take a moment to reflect on the Festival…
You don’t have to be ‘woke’ to be troubled by the Fitzwilliam Museum’s links to slavery
What happens when a museum outlives the worldview of its founder? For publicly funded museums with collections amassed during the…
A Picasso doc that – amazingly – focuses on how great he was
Earlier this year, the Guardian took a break from arguing that ‘cancel culture’ is a right-wing myth to ask the…
Diamond-bright hoot
Oh to be in London with Barrie Kosky calling the shots in the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle Das…
Life
In defence of cows
‘They’re going to have to stop cows,’ said my mother, looking doubtfully down at her plate as we tucked into…
The murky world of bloodstock agents
Top owners are quitting horse racing because bookmakers nervous of a government and a Gambling Commission that know remarkably little…
Aussie life
There was a time when Australians prided themselves on their nose for bulls–t and for their willingness to call it…
Language
One of the powers of language is that it can give us the words (the tools) to think about our…
How I lost my Hungarian Vizsla, Leo, to the Dangerous Dogs Act
Not everyone welcomed Rishi Sunak’s announcement last week that he would ban the XL Bully under the Dangerous Dogs Act.…
Why driving above the speed limit is a mug’s game
Imagine you are choosing between two proposed road-improvement plans, but have the budget for only one. Both of the roads…
You have to be truly incompetent to eat badly in Paris
Paris has enough great restaurants to maintain its claim to be the world capital of gastronomy. That said, Parisian residents…
Push-bike
Books that one often used to see in secondhand bookshops, when there were such things, were the World’s Classics editions…
Bridge | 23 September 2023
The great Bob Hamman, in his heyday the best player in the world, was once asked what the biggest mistakes…
India’s rising stars
The former world champion Vishy Anand has described the current crop of young Indian talents as a golden generation. At…
Puzzle no. 770
White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by C.G.S. Narayanan, K. Seetharaman, 2017. Answers should be emailed to…
Spectator competition winners: why you should never open a novel with the weather
In Competition No. 3317 you were invited to provide an opening to a novel that bears out Elmore Leonard’s tip…
2623: Half-day closing?
29 29-36’s 14 13 31 25 1D 2 24, in which 1 Down and 24 are each non-words that concatenate…
Solution to: 2620: The right name?
8A/31D, 23A/19D and 36D/7D are eponymous 29D/12A characters. 7D originally suggested D’Urberville, which needed to be changed to DURBEYFIELD, making…
