The Spectator
7 October 2023 Aus
Silent majority
Australia
Silent majority
And so here we are at a pivotal moment in Australian history. Australians must now make a decisive choice between…
Australian Features
A ‘pearson’ of platitudes
Why were the words ‘non-binding’ not included in the Voice proposal?
Housing policy built on dodgy foundations
Government hasn’t got a clue about the economics of renting
Features
Battle begins: inside Rishi Sunak’s plan to take on Labour
Prepare for a presidential campaign
Train wreck: HS2 destroyed the countryside I love
The countryside where I grew up has been destroyed by HS2
Why are House of Lords clerics so anti-Tory?
The left-wing bias of the House of Lords bishops
The Week
Is this really the end of the A-level?
The history of education reform is a graveyard of acronyms: TVEIs, GNVQs and so on. There have been many well-meaning…
Columnists
What ‘populist’ really means
Two months ago, in these pages, I predicted that Robert Fico’s Smer-SD party would win the Slovakian elections and everybody…
The folk wisdom that’s just wrong
I was only a boy when I first began protesting against the idiocy of so much of the folk wisdom…
I’m leaving Britain – and I feel guilty
I’m torn between headlining this column ‘Why I’m moving to Portugal’ and ‘Why I’m leaving the UK’. Exhausted, shadowed by…
Do I have a ‘work addiction’?
What follows may suggest that I require an ‘intervention’. Readers might even interpret this column as a cry for help.…
Books
Remember, remember
The world that blossoms in this haunting novel about the importance of memory is in the aesthetic vein known as ‘mono no aware’, or ‘the pathos of things’
Looking on the bright side
The Rochdale lass who sang her way from music hall to the silver screen encouraged a spirit of resilience and community in the interwar years, says Simon Heffer
What makes other people’s groceries so engrossing?
Ingrid Swenson spent ten years retrieving discarded shopping lists at a London Waitrose, and the result is a rare glimpse into entire, private worlds
The difficulties faced by identical twins
Being the genetic copy of another human not only presents problems of individuality but offers a ‘rare form of experimental control’, says William Viney
Gentle genius
Dissatisfied with his unfinished epic, the dying Vergil called for his scrolls to be burned, but was fortunately overruled by the Emperor Augustus
An absolute earful
Singing sands, the dawn chorus and the crackle of the Northern Lights are among the many natural wonders explored in Caspar Henderson’s paean to the act of listening
Stark realities
Lawyers, teachers, architects and engineers all enjoy sex behind the scenes at a Houston gay bar in a novel focusing on relationships among black urban men
Too many tales of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle
Contemplating ‘hedgehog philosophy’ with Sarah Sands, Rowan Williams, Greta Thunberg and other luminaries would test anyone’s patience after 150 pages
Learned necromancers and lascivious witches: magic and misogyny through the ages
We seem just as captivated by magic today as our Sumerian ancestors ever were, says Suzi Feay
Arts
That extraordinary mutant masterpiece
It’s been a long time coming, Patricia Cornelius’ My Sister Jill but she’s a playwright whose work demands to be…
A great subject squandered: Golda reviewed
Born in Tsarist Kyiv in 1898, Golda Meir grew up with what she called a ‘pogrom complex’. That perhaps explained…
Shocking: Channel 4’s Partygate reviewed
If there were special awards for Most Subtlety in a Television Drama, Tuesday’s Partygate would be unlikely to win one.…
Godot with gags: It’s Headed Straight Towards Us, at Park200, reviewed
It sounds like a barking-mad student sketch but the final product is marinated in wisdom and maturity. It’s Headed Straight…
An awfully long night for a band without any bangers: The National, at Alexandra Palace, reviewed
Over the past few years, the National have become the most important band in modern rock music. The strange thing…
Why everyone should go to life-drawing classes: Claudette Johnson interviewed
While looking at Claudette Johnson’s splendid exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery, I kept trying to pin down an elusive…
Ebullience and majesty: Opera North’s Falstaff reviewed
Opera North has launched a ‘Green Season’, which means (among other things) that the sets and costumes for its new…
Marina Abramovic’s show is only of interest to diehard fans
‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ More than 30 years after the Guerrilla Girls…
Stone is the solution to many of our architectural problems
Calvin Po on the revival of building in the solid, sustainable, dependable material that lies readily beneath our feet
Life
Aussie life
The death of actor David McCallum last week prompted me to google the theme music for The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,…
Language
A reader has asked me about the common expression ‘virtue-signalling’. The meaning, I think, is fairly clear. It is a…
2622: Local call – solution
The unclued lights are PUB NAMES which include the pair 38/31 First prize Mary Newbery, Devizes, Wiltshire Runners-up David Burnside,…
2625: Playtime
The unclued lights (one of two words) and four others clued without their thematic definition are of a kind. Across…
Tories know how to find themselves a good drink
I feel old, and feelings are not always wrong, This eheu fugaces mood came on me at the Conservative party…
Spectator competition winners: what Elon Musk’s home says about him
In Competition No. 3319 you were invited to supply a description of the house of a well-known figure from the…
Is there such a thing as too much empathy?
Back in the 1970s, a less politically correct age, there was a standby formula for television advertising known as 2Cs…
An injured hand has given me a glimpse of old age
I first realised something was wrong with my hand last Thursday evening. I’d been invited by a friend to go…