The Spectator
16 March 2024 Aus
Sam’s own goal
Australia
Sam’s own goal
‘WATCH UNDER!’ was the warning cry made famous by one of Australia’s original expat Aussies living in London, as he…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
I would be a poor columnist if I continued with my monk-like silence on the war in Gaza. It is…
Australian Features
Fed up and grumpy
Can we please stop talking about things that ain’t gonna happen
We need an Aussie Samizdat Prize
A questioning and sceptical press? Now there’s an idea
Features
Is the C of E about to say sorry for Christianity?
Is the Church of England going to apologise for Christianity? A report by something called the Oversight Group has declared…
The Week
Columnists
Beware pathological niceness
When so many polls suggest that restricting mass immigration would be to politicians’ electoral advantage, voters in the West are…
Books
How ever did the inbred Habsburgs control their vast empire?
For centuries, a line of mentally retarded monarchs managed extraordinary feats of engineering across the world against all odds
The dirty war of Sefton Delmer
Anything to break German morale was allowable in Delmer’s broadcasts from Wavendon Towers – which purported to come from a disgruntled character within Nazi Germany
How much would your family stump up for your ransom?
Researching The Price of Life, Jenny Kleeman interviews Stephen Collet, who describes haggling for a year with the Somali pirates who kidnapped his sister in October 2009
Work, walk, meditate: Practice, by Rosalind Brown, reviewed
An Oxford undergraduate makes a detailed plan for getting the most out of a quiet Sunday in January, but soon starts musing on what it feels like to be distracted
Conning the booktrade connoisseurs
Fuelled by loathing and resentment, Thomas James Wise set about defrauding as many privileged bibliophiles as he could – only to be rumbled by two of their number
You are what you don’t eat
In the past, the ability to preserve food depended largely on people’s means, making Eleanor Barnett’s history of food waste also a history of changing attitudes to poverty
The end of days: It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken, reviewed
‘Don’t try to picture the apocalypse’, advises the novel’s unnamed zombie narrator. ‘Everything looks exactly the way you remembered it.’
The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical
Comyns’s fans have long enjoyed the novels’ macabre details and black humour. Now Avril Horner reveals their disturbing sources
A web of rivalries: The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft, reviewed
Eight translators gather to work on a novel written by their heroine, Irena Rey. But when she goes missing in a nearby forest, relations between them begin to fray
The tyranny of 1970s self-help gurus
Clients pursuing ’true self’ were expected to wear identical clothes, shave their heads, self-flagellate and be ‘given hell’, while paying through the nose for it
Arts
Another popular feast
Miriam Margolyes was not wrong – however intrepid she may have been – to remark to Her late Majesty the…
Sinister panto about the formation of the NHS: Nye, at the Olivier Theatre, reviewed
A Judy Garland rendition, dancing nurses, a star lead: no spectacle is spared in Tim Price’s new play Nye, which…
Life
Aussie life
Much has been written of Australian soccer captain Sam Kerr’s big night out in the back of a London cab.…
Language
When we use Old Aussie we might call a bloke a ‘cove’ – but why? Why is an adult male…