The Spectator
29 March 2025 Aus
Will Trump join the strongman club?
Australia
Rooted in failure
Australia is rooted. That is the message from the Albanese government as it heads towards an election it thoroughly deserves…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
One of the great mysteries of life here in Marvellous Melbourne is why the Age is assumed to be so…
Australian notes
In 2023 a constitutional referendum was held on an Indigenous Voice to parliament. Had the Yes vote carried the majority…
Australian Features
Judges to rule the world?
High time for executive pushback against judicial overreach
Features
How Dr Seuss took on American isolationism
A cartoon is doing the rounds online, critiquing American isolationism and the reluctance to engage with the war in Europe.…
Is Simon Heffer a security threat?
Airport security was much on my mind last Friday afternoon. I had been due to fly from Heathrow to Zurich…
I’m ready to defend my Tesla from the mob
Occitanie, France In France, burning cars is practically a national sport. Almost 1,000 were set on fire on New Year’s…
The Boden Belt: the Lib Dems are the new party of the posh
The English social season has begun, kicking off with Gold Cup day. But this year, there is a new common…
Erdogan’s latest power move could backfire
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has never been so weak – nor so strong. At home, he is facing the…
The curious language of coins
Lewis Carroll used to travel with purses divided into separate compartments, each containing the exact number of coins he’d need…
Will Trump join the strongman club?
The world’s most exclusive club, of presidents-for-life, is growing. It already includes Putin of Russia, Xi of China, Lukashenko of…
The weapon that could end America’s global supremacy
Two weeks ago, a bright light streaked through the night sky above Inner Mongolia. It was not an asteroid. The…
The Week
Letters: The futility of net zero
Not zero Sir: I was delighted to see your leading article about the impossibility of net zero (‘Carbon candour’, 22…
How many teenagers kill?
That ship has sailed The BBC children’s television programme Blue Peter will no longer be broadcast live. Why did it…
The underlying message of Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement
Rachel Reeves may not be the most mellifluous writer ever to inhabit 11 Downing Street. At the weekend, she informed…
How to live morally (according to the Romans)
‘Make America Great Again!’ cries Donald Trump. ‘Do Britain Down Again!’ (DOBRIDA!) screech our academic historical institutions. That was not…
Portrait of the week: Spring Statement, Heathrow fire and Prince Harry quits his charity
Home In the Spring Statement, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made further cuts to benefits (such as freezing…
Steve Witkoff is wrong to see peace in Putin’s eyes
Kyiv ‘It doesn’t surprise me that they’re abolishing the Ministry of Education,’ my old friend Dima told me. ‘Judging by…
Columnists
UK tax on US tech is a useful bargaining chip
The Digital Services Tax (DST) is a relatively easy bargaining chip to give away in a last-ditch bid to appease…
Has the Assisted Dying Bill been killed off?
The reported decision to postpone the implementation of the Assisted Dying Bill until 2029 might, one must pray, turn out…
Americans are right to hate us
In an Appalachian high school, the kids were set the task of writing about Europeans as part of their history…
Labour’s popularity contest
A few months ago, over a plate of bone marrow, a Tory adviser was considering how best to kneecap Labour.…
America is a moral idea or it is nothing
Harold Wilson once declared that the Labour party ‘is a moral crusade or it is nothing’, a proposition whose logical…
JFK conspiracy theories won’t die
One of the most controversial things that can happen at any American table is to start talking about the JFK…
The Met’s misogyny
My friend Rose likes a drink. She lives on the same street as another friend in Camden and three or…
Books
Heroes of the Norwegian resistance
Among many fascinating characters is Gunnar Waaler, a double agent who passed on intelligence to the British while posing as an enthusiastic member of Quisling’s police force
Deep mysteries: Twist, by Colum McCann, reviewed
An enigmatic captain tasked with repairing undersea communication cables disappears, and it’s up to his shipmate to discover why
Why, at 75, does Graydon Carter still feel the need to impress?
The humblebrag and name-dropping read more like a Craig Brown pastiche than the reminiscences of one of America’s most celebrated magazine editors
A meditation on the beauty of carbon
In fact carbon proves just a peg for a series of essays on the oneness of life, with references to ‘ancient teachings’ , ‘other ways of knowing’ and Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies
A novel in disguise: Theory & Practice, by Michelle de Kretser, reviewed
De Kretser’s witty, innovative take on the immigrant’s predicament tries ingeniously to persuade us that we are not reading fiction but documentary truth
Bringing modernism to the masses in 20th-century Britain
Owen Hatherley examines the contribution of refugees from central Europe to the film industry, publishing and public art, especially architecture and town planning
Escape into fantasy: Stories of Ireland, by Brian Friel, reviewed
Friel’s tightly knit rural communities like to cling to illusions, whether it’s belief in sunken gold in the bay or in the continual prosperity of impoverished gentry
The story of Noah’s flood will never go out of fashion
Most cultures have a universal flood myth, and the idea of a cataclysmic climate event brought on by human wickedness is always bound to resonate
Across the universe – John and Paul are in each other’s songs forever
The Lennon-McCartney collaboration was one of genius from the start – and even in later years their songs continued to speak to one another, says Ian Leslie
How Anne Frank’s photograph became as recognisable as the Mona Lisa
To date, the diary, pieced together from Anne’s notebooks, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, with her story further explored in plays, films and novels
Arts
Intensely engaging
The Australian National Academy of Music gala performance on Friday 21 March was dazzling with guest conductor Asher Fisch leading…
Dope Thief is a cut above your usual inner-city crime-drama porn
I really had no interest in watching Dope Thief. It’s another of those crime dramas set in a bleak-looking city…
I wish someone would kill or eat useless Totoro
My Neighbour Totoro is a hugely successful show based on a Japanese movie made in 1988. The setting is a…
What a joy to see some Merce Cunningham again
How salutary to encounter the cool cerebral elegance of Merce Cunningham’s choreography again. A figure at the heart of the…
Traditional music at its most graceful, ingenious and jaw-dropping
I was talking recently to a rock guitarist about the amount of music an audience hears during a typical concert…
Ridiculously fun: Assassin’s Creed – Shadows reviewed
Grade: A Sometimes you want to admire the pluck and inventiveness of an indie developer. At other times, you just…
Why we’re flocking to matinees
The Starland Vocal Band were on to something. In their 1976 hit ‘Afternoon Delight’ they sang, in gruesomely twee harmony:…
I genuinely feared The End would never end
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End is a ‘post-apocalyptic musical’ starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon that is being sold as a…
Splendid revival of an unsurpassed production: Royal Opera’s Turandot reviewed
Puccini’s Turandot is back at the Royal Opera in the 40-year old production by Andrei Serban and… well, guilty pleasure…
Life
Aussie life
A sad legacy of Dark Emu, or rather of the embarrassing embrace of its ludicrous central thesis by our education…
Language
It’s easy to picture the situation: a politician who has been an outspoken supporter of China (insisting their government is…
Why do we diminish ‘compendious’?
My husband has been telling me, at some length, about the Gamages Christmas catalogue that fired his childhood imagination and…
My hunt for a doctor took a horror movie turn
My American guest went down with a cough he could not shift and, after a week of protesting that he…
My highlights from the Cheltenham Festival
When Poniros, trained by Willie Mullins, swept home in this year’s Triumph Hurdle as the first 100-1 Cheltenham Festival winner…
How to be a Lord
At the end of my first day at the House of Lords, I staggered out with so many books and…
Dear Mary: How do I stop Ozempic ruining my dinner parties?
Q. I enjoy giving dinner parties and put a lot of effort into the preparations. However, recently I have noticed…
Boxing belongs in the Olympics
If there is anything more pointless than signing a five-year contract to be Emma Raducanu’s coach, it is the effort…
A creche for nepo babies: the River Cafe Cafe reviewed
The River Cafe has grown a thrifty annexe, and this passes for democratisation. All restaurants are tribal: if dukes have…
Can I survive six months without my books?
My story begins with a very small puddle on the kitchen floor. As it was nowhere near the sink, I…
Flat white
Editor’s picks
