Take our readers survey to be in with a chance of winning six bottles of Pol Roger champagne | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Spectator ClubThe promoter is: Spectator Ltd (company no. 1232804) whose registered office is at 22 Old Queen Street. The competition is open to residents of the United Kingdom aged 18 years or over except employees
Wales Letters: Lauren Laverne is a wonderful Desert Island Discs host | The SpectatorThe SpectatorSir: In his defence of Christianity (‘Losing our religion’, 10 August), Greg Sheridan writes as if Christianity and religion are interchangeable terms. His claim that the vast majority of people who have
Monica LewinskyLap-dancing with ISIS, the real Monica Lewinsky and one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen: Edinburgh Fringe roundupThe Spectator - Lloyd EvansClive Anderson’s show about Macbeth, ‘the greatest drama ever written’, offers us an hour of polished comedy loosely themed around the Scottish play. Shakespeare’s material is still topical, he says, clever
By taking on grouse-shooting, Labour is risking rural jobs | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Toby YoungThe Glorious Twelfth this year, signalling the start of the grouse-shooting season, was overshadowed by a Labour party press release demanding a ‘review’ into driven shooting. Labour’s shadow environment
Nottinghamshire, UK to 2418: Sweet | The SpectatorThe SpectatorUnclued lights are all sweet wines. WESTERNISED, an anagram of DESSERT WINE, was to be highlighted.   First prize Erin Barrack, Beeston, Nottinghamshire Runners-up Jane F. Adongo, Canterbury, Kent
Kashmir From Hong Kong to Kashmir, a new authoritarianism is on the rise | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Peter OborneFrank Johnson, editor of The Spectator until cruelly sacked to make way for Boris Johnson, never wasted ideas. He liked to reuse them. Often. Every summer he would write the same column attacking the season.
Jo Johnson I’m giving £200 to whoever can tell me who has made the nation’s buttocks ache | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Matthew ParrisLook out. Here comes a column banging on about something that, in the grand scheme of things, really doesn’t matter. But I’ve just turned 70 and surely among the compensations for old age must be the to
Torquay Spanish eyes | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Lucy VickeryIn Competition No. 3111 you were invited to submit William Topaz McGonagall’s poetic response to Magaluf. The Tayside Tragedian was much taken with the town of Torquay, and wrote a poem singing its praises.
Don’t blame the West for the climate emergency | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Lionel ShriverWhen last week’s IPCC report warned that the human race may soon have trouble feeding itself, my reaction was: duh. Having pooh-poohed the 1960s ‘population bomb’ alarmism that would have us all balancing
Daffy charm and diabolo tricks: Bolshoi’s The Bright Stream reviewed | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Laura FreemanSadler’s Wells, until 31 August, then touring until 12 October The Bright Stream is a ballet about a collective farm. Forget everything you know about collectivism — the failed harvests, the famines —
Mattresses I’ve always enjoyed myself on Wayfair – but this time I’ve had enough | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Melissa KiteOne thing Lorraine Kelly does not say in the Wayfair advert is: ‘What if I fancy getting my money back for an item that hasn’t arrived?’ I guess they’ve only got 30 seconds, and it’s a wee bit complicated.
20th Century The trailblazing women writers of the 1960s were quite different from the male Angries | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Sarah DitumThe accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and the Angry Young Men, with women relegated to bit parts. Celia Brayfield’s book
Long-form Journalism Walter Bagehot: the revered Victorian who got almost everything wrong | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Jesse NormanBagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian James Grant Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of
Republic of the Congo Which country locks up the most people? | The SpectatorThe SpectatorPolish village Miejsce Odrzanskie was reported not to have had a single boy born in the past decade, though 12 girls have been born in the same period. However, such an imbalance is far from a freak occurrence:
Indigenous Australians We are only half-reconciled | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Andrew L. UrbanSenator Pat Dodson, often called the ‘father of reconciliation’, said last week that political leaders had failed to reconcile with Indigenous people, despite doing so with nations Australia had gone war
Hats no. 567 | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Raymond KeeneWhite to play. This position is from Alekhine-Nimzowitsch, San Remo 1930. Can you spot the quiet move that puts black in zugzwang? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 20 August or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk.
Dominic Cummings How No. 10 is taking back control | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Katy BallsEvery Friday at 6 p.m. government aides are summoned to No. 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s right-hand man. Here they are plied with alcoholic beverages, updated
Goodwood Why do race-goers have to subsidise the post-sport entertainment? | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Robin OakleyBefore this year’s Shergar Cup meeting all I had seen of Australian flat jockey Mark Zahra was a memorably painful picture of him at Flemington racecourse on Melbourne Cup day some years ago, his red white
Sex and the City Pity poor Candace Bushnell, still flogging Sex and the City at 60 | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Julie BurchillOn paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a fortune from persuading a generation of women that brunch with a bunch of broads was something to
Love Stories Maxine Peake | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Donald McDonaldWe live in a time of paradoxes. The NSW Parliament has just legislated for terminations to be performed from 22 weeks while our public hospitals devote considerable resources to sustaining pre-term babies
Poetry What to call an inferior politician? | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Dot Wordsworth‘What about poetaster, then?’ asked my husband accusingly, looking up from his whisky and the Spectator, in which I’d ruminated on gloomster. He expects me to know the origins of all words, and blames
Haggis Like Team Boris, I’m staying in London this summer | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Bruce AndersonFoolish me. I could have been writing this by the shore of Lake Trasimene, with only one problem: how to transmit it to London. Last time I stayed in the delightful house there, the technology was still
Wine Wine Club 17 August | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Jonathan RayEveryone loves Beaujolais. Now come on, don’t be like that! Of course they do! I’m not talking about ropey old Beaujolais Nouveau, that vin ordinaire — vin very ordinaire — of 1980s notoriety; I’m talking
Oncology A day spent in Oncology | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Jeremy ClarkeA 20-minute drive through quiet country lanes then suddenly a madcap roundabout and teeming new ring road and finally the hospital car park where I leave the car unlocked and the windows down because in
Caroline Lucas An all-female cabinet? Insert your own joke here | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Rod LiddleI wonder what Jacques Derrida would have made of the new leader of the UK Independence party? In the philosopher’s typically readable and sensible tract On the Name, Derrida muses: ‘The name: What does
Chess Zugger zugged | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Raymond KeeneThe German expression zugzwang means ‘compulsion to move’ and is most often seen in the endgame. Consider the following position on Diagram 1. It is Black to move. If Black were not obliged to move he
Migration Migration in Europe is the ripple effect of the second world war | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Kapka KassabovaThe Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present Peter Gatrell Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished
Brexit How Boris’s Roman predecessors took back control | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Peter JonesThe Tories, allegedly a ‘one-nation’ party, are currently imposing Brexit on a divided nation. As a result, some Tory MPs will vote against Brexit, effectively abandoning the party. This raises the question
