PREVIOUS ISSUES

CHOOSE A PREVIOUS ISSUE FROM THE LIST    


THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

The Spectator

5 March 2022 Aus

It’s curtains

Ukraine crisis forces the West to grow up. Can Australia?

Sign up to The Spectator Australia newsletter

Australia's best political analysis - straight to your inbox

Australia

Leading article Australia

Castrating Australia

Within this week’s issue we present a number of articles and different points of view surrounding the invasion of Ukraine,…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Not so silent invasion

Chinese infiltration of the West is rampant

Features Australia

Trudeau’s toxic tantrum tyranny

The enemies of the West revel in her decline

Features Australia

Business/Robbery, etc.

Ukraine: first victim of the war on fossil fuels

Features Australia

Wokeness in action

The policies of Team Biden have proved disastrous. Who’d’ve guessed?

Features Australia

It’s curtains

Ukraine crisis forces the West to grow up. Can Australia?

Features Australia

Our misinformed elites

Covid has exposed the West’s flawed experts and mandarins

Features Australia

Dangerous concessions

Biden is empowering a nuclear axis of evil

Features Australia

Building boom

Spending millions whilst airbrushing the past

Features

Features

In Japan, being a token westerner is big business

How to make money as a token westerner in Japan

Features

The untimely death of the landline

The premature death of the home phone

Features

Could the Ukraine war save Taiwan?

What the Ukraine war means for China — and Taiwan

Features

Why are so many classic British brands going downmarket?

Why are so many classic British brands going downmarket?

Features

My escape from Kiev

My relief – and guilt – at getting out of Ukraine

Features

Putin’s rage: the Russian President won’t be easy to topple

Despite western hopes, the Russian President won’t be easy to topple

Notes on...

The prickly truth: hedgehogs face a struggle to survive

No wild animal is closer to the hearts of the British than the hedgehog. In poll after poll, it has…

The Week

Ancient and modern

Does Putin pass Aristotle’s tyrant test?

Is Putin a tyrant? Aristotle (384-322 bc) might well have thought so. Seeing the turannos as a deviant type of…

Barometer

What does it mean to go ‘full tonto’?

The wild one Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said that Vladimir Putin had gone ‘full tonto’. The word tonto is used…

Diary

In Lviv, the mood is inspiring – and fanatical

  Lviv, Ukraine On the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, near a place called Shehyni where the refugee crisis…

Leading article

Britain must give Ukrainians an unconditional right to asylum

During the Cold War, any citizen of a Soviet bloc country who made it to Britain and claimed asylum was…

Letters

Letters: How the UK should respond to Russia

Soft options Sir: In relation to strengthening the impact of the Russian sanctions package (‘Tsar Vladimir’, 26 February), please may…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: Russia bombs Ukraine, MPs get a pay rise and Tube staff strike

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia: ‘Never in all my study or…

Columnists

Columns

The free world’s new reality

We are about to see brutality in Europe on a scalethat will be almost beyond our comprehension. Russia is turning…

The Spectator's Notes

The true meaning of 'emergency'

Much attention has been paid to how Vladimir Putin has learnt from western weakness over his earlier invasions, including into…

Columns

Has Putin saved Boris?

It was with some relief that I heard that Labour’s Diane Abbott was opposed to the Russian invasion of Croatia,…

Columns

What the right gets wrong about Putin

A fracture on the international right may seem small fry given everything that is going on right now. But it…

Columns

I’ve found a little Eden in London

I’m not one of life’s early risers but an exception had to be made on Wednesday last week. In an…

Columns

The return of Actual Badness

In the spring of 2020, I advanced an abnormally hopeful proposition: that one blessing that might arise from a pandemic…

Any other business

At least BP and Shell tried to teach Russia true capitalism

BP will offload the 20 per cent stake in Rosneft, the Kremlin-controlled energy giant, that is the residue of 25…

Books

More from Books

What the Anglo-Saxons made of 1066 and all that followed

By any yardstick, the Norman Conquest was a ghastly business. Within two decades, the English aristocracy had been more than…

More from Books

Sister, where are you? – Clover Stroud mourns her beloved sibling

‘CERTIFICATE IS NOT EVIDENCE OF IDENTITY,’ the freshly issued death certificate read. In the craziness and shock of grief for…

More from Books

The making of a poet: Mother’s Boy, by Patrick Gale, reviewed

Charles Causley was a poet’s poet. Both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin considered him the finest candidate for the laureateship,…

More from Books

Troubles of the past: The Slowworm’s Song, by Andrew Miller, reviewed

Andrew Miller specialises in characters who are lost, often struggling to deal with the burden of failure. They don’t come…

More from Books

TB is back with a vengeance

If you were a teenager before 2005, one reminder of tuberculosis in British life is that small circular scar on…

More from Books

Julie Burchill has found a new way to provoke: she’s turned sincere

The greatest ever social media spat took place before the first tweet was sent, and was conducted via fax, which…

More from Books

The torment of mentoring spoilt rich kids

For 20 years of my adult life, I moonlighted as a private tutor. After a full day in the office…

Lead book review

The fuss over Mary Seacole’s statue has obscured the real person

Mary Seacole may not have qualified as a nurse in the modern sense, but British troops benefited greatly from her healing skills, says Andrew Lycett

Arts

Australian Arts

Tinkling irrevelancies?

So Opera Australia is in quest of a new artistic director to replace Lyndon Terracini. It’s a good moment to…

Theatre

Paul Bettany's Warhol is a tour de force: The Collaboration, at the Young Vic, reviewed

The Collaboration is set in the 1980s when Andy Warhol teamed up with the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat to create bad…

The Listener

Too neat but it has hooks aplenty: Avril Lavigne's Love Sux reviewed

Grade: B Yay, life just gets better and better. World War Three and now this. More petulant popcorn pre-school punk…

Exhibitions

Beautiful and revealing: The Three Pietàs of Michelangelo, at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Florence, reviewed

The room is immersed in semi-darkness. Light filters down from above, glistening on polished marble as if it were flesh.…

Television

Enthralling and unusual – even if you don't care about Kanye: Netflix's Jeen-yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy reviewed

The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music…

Cinema

Humourless and stale: The Batman reviewed

The latest Batman film, The Batman, may be a reboot, or even a reboot of a rebooted reboot that’s been…

Classical

The genius of Iannis Xenakis

This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…

Radio

Some of the best social commentary around: Celebrity Book Club with Steven & Lily reviewed

When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League…

Arts feature

Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning art scene

Stuart Jeffries on Saudi Arabia’s burgeoning art scene

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie Life

I’m thinking about acquiring a drug habit. As a New South Wales Seniors Card carrier I may have left it…

Aussie Life

Aussie Language

We are used to words being banned – but now it seems the word police are coming for the word…

Low life

My oncologist has a new weapon in his arsenal

‘We’re at war!’ said the taxi man as I installed myself for the long drive to Marseille. I put a…

Chess

Russia in check

The Champions League final has been moved from St Petersburg to Paris and the Russian Grand Prix in Sochi cancelled.…

Real life

The politics of trees

Trees glorious trees. People can’t get enough of them. They don’t want to take care of trees, they just want…

Mind your language

The complicated business of swearing in Ukrainian

‘This will interest you,’ said my husband, looking up from the smeared screen of his telephone. For once he was…

Competition

Spectator competition winners: poems about literary feuds

In Competition No. 3238, you were invited to submit a poem about a literary feud. Wallace Stevens’s 1936 fisticuffs with…

The Wiki Man

How to post a parcel without leaving your house

Here’s a useful tip. Go to the Royal Mail websiteand you can ask your postman to collect letters or parcels…

Bridge

Bridge | 5 March 2022

Few things in life compare to the joy of playing bridge, but if I rack my brain I can think…

Drink

The story of Tuscany’s all-female winery

The inhabitants of Tuscany and Umbria can claim to be the most civilised beings on the planet, even exceeding the…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: How do I stop my new friend leaving me broke?

Q. Recently I started hanging out with a new friend. We are both in our twenties, single, and usually go…

No sacred cows

Nuclear war, magic mushrooms and a teenage trip I’ll never forget

Vladimir Putin’s decision on Sunday to put his ‘deterrence forces’ – code for nuclear weapons – in a high state…

Crossword solution

2542: Wider II - solution

The unclued lights and COMPOSERS (35A) are RIBBONS/Gibbons (1A), MAILER/Mahler (7), RAMEAN/Rameau (25), WANTON/Walton (26A), DELICES/Delibes (46), RAVENER/Tavener (1D), BELLING/Bellini…

Crossword

2545: With a twist

41 (four words) suggests the other unclued lights – which are individual examples (not group names) of a kind –…

Chess puzzle

No. 692

White to play and win. A gem discovered by the Ukrainian composer Vladislav Tarasiuk with Israeli composer Amatzia Avni. How…

The turf

My top tips for Cheltenham Festival

Even when the authorities were refusing Milton Harris the right to renew his training licence after he got his finances…

High life

St Moritz is unique among ski resorts

St Moritz Once upon a time, not that long ago, St Moritz was the world’s greatest resort, an exclusive winter…