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The Spectator
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Myanmar’s junta has once again shown its true self: calculated, despicable, and violently unrestrained. Last night, warplanes dropped two 500-pound...


Be afraid, be very afraid. That’s what we’d been told in the advertising and commercial production industry. AI is coming for your job. It’ll be...


Christmas is prime time for cosy crime and the excellent thriller writer Nicola Upson offers a short, pleasing contribution with The Christmas Clue...


It’s tricky for writers to gather up pieces of old work and collect them in significant literary form. It’s risky for former politicians to publish...


Our Santa Pants cocktail is one of our go-to holiday pours when hosting at this time of year. Made with our organic tequila and ginger beer,...

On Advent Sunday, our grandson Christian became a Christian. He was baptised, sleeping, in the font of our parish church. On the whiteboard in the...


Harper Lee’s writing career was brief, but her single novel became one of the most famous in American history. To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) won the...


I had searched for it for the better part of 20 years. An enormous trove of lost maps, the 800 or so sheets of an immense and madcap Victorian...


What has gone wrong for Americans? To listen to an increasing number of politicians and pundits on both sides, from Tucker Carlson to Alexandria...


Robert Langdon is a symbologist, and that is the meta joke – the only joke – of Dan Brown’s series of blockbusters, of which this is the sixth....


Time was, we took lessons from brute creation. Medieval bestiaries, books of beasts, weren’t simply descriptions of animals; these compendiums of...


A century ago, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was settling into his first term at Stromness Academy. His schooldays were to prove a dismal...


Gyles Brandreth has narrated this article for you to listen to. Queen Camilla loves a book. Almost any book will do. ‘There’s something so tactile...

As Christmas approaches and we wrack our brains to find something that suits everyone, there is no present quite like a book. Whether it’s an...


Peter Thiel has been described variously as ‘America’s leading public intellectual’, the ‘architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary...


It comes as a surprise for anyone assuming that ghosthunters are easily fooled scaredy cats to learn that there was once a Society for Psychical...


A woman confronts a biological man in a female changing room. She is later found to have harassed him because he identified as a woman. Many...


The NHS is facing a ‘worst-case scenario’ for flu this winter. That was the verdict of Professor Meghana Pandit, national medical director for the...

Alcoholics know that hell is denial, and there is plenty at Disneyland Paris in winter. This is a pleasure land risen from a field and everyone has...

Towards the end of the war, a young Guards officer met some Italian aristocrats. They had much in common. Robert Cecil was the heir to a...

‘Dearly beloved friends and family, well, what a year it’s been! Where to start?! The big event for us – aside from nurturing our preternaturally...


London has become the best place in the world to eat out. Of course, there are a thousand other cities with marvellous food, but for organic...


It’s election time in the Falklands, where every four years we choose eight members of the Islands’ legislative assembly. They say you don’t...


I have sweet memories of Christmas. My dad is proper old-school and would set up the video recorder. I don’t think we’ve ever watched the footage;...


‘On BBC 2 last Monday,’ noted the Sunday Telegraph’s TV critic Trevor Grove in February 1979, ‘the return of Fawlty Towers was immediately...

A Christmas Carol is pretty well unavoidable around now, with Little Women trailing somewhat behind. There’s no shortage of alternative literary...

I set up In Our Time 27 years ago. I had been shunted from Start the Week to what was cheerfully known as the ‘death slot’, 9 a.m. on Thursdays,...


In August, the President of the United States declared a crime ‘emergency’ in my home town of Washington D.C. Donald Trump rules by declaring ‘...

Avi Loeb has narrated this article for you to listen to. The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of...

We will remember 2025 as the year that a madness which had gripped us for a decade finally succumbed to that most irritating of things, reality –...


Another day, another bad poll for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party. With less than six months until the Scottish parliament election, pollsters are...

Benjamin Disraeli once observed that the difference between a misfortune and a calamity was that if Mr Gladstone fell in the Thames it would be a...


It’s all too easy to get hooked by the online world, to fall headlong into it, to spend hour upon hour immersed in it. Cyberspace has its good, but...


Would someone please think of the luvvies? While the rest of the nation is furious about our out-of-control borders and the heinous crimes...


We are, as vicars like to tell us, all special in our own way. But none so much as children in Scottish primary schools, 43 per cent of whom are...


Fifa looks set to face its first major scandal of the 2026 World Cup – if you don’t count the exorbitant cost of the tickets, that is. The...


There were ‘too many leaks’ ahead of the autumn Budget, Rachel Reeves admitted this morning as she faced MPs on the Treasury Select Committee. The...
