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The Spectator |
Weaponising trade; interfering in the domestic affairs of open societies; using technological dependencies to undermine national security; threatening...
The death of the Norwegian monarch, King Harald, at the age of 89 might, initially, seem like a sad but ultimately inconsequential event as far as the...
It was just 78 days ago that John Healey resigned as defence secretary, heralding the beginning of the end of Keir Starmer’s government. In his...
Russia’s threats towards Britain in recent weeks of ‘consequences’ for its continued support of Ukraine have allowed the government to start...
Is Andy Burnham running a ‘circuit breaker’ government from the one led by Keir Starmer, or is it a ‘continuity’ administration? Chancellor...
Welcome to kite-flying season. With exactly two months to go until Andy Burnham and John Healey’s first Budget, we’re beginning to get a shape of...
Bloomsbury’s former editor-in-chief Alexandra Pringle popped up on the Today programme this week to argue that Jason Arday’s publisher could...
It’s rather appropriate that General Ratko Mladic, the 84-year-old former commander in chief of the Bosnian Serb army, ‘Butcher of the Balkans’...
It’s been a tough old time for private schools. Amid endless self-aggrandising, Keir Starmer’s ministers took great pleasure in whacking VAT on...
Will the government ever get around to reforming the welfare system? I ask because Andy Burnham seems to have bottled out. It seems that there will be...
Just under a month has passed since the sudden, mass arrival of approximately 80,000 mostly Moroccans and sub-Saharan Africans in the Spanish exclave...
The fight for France is underway. The 2027 presidential campaign began last night as the leading candidates clashed in a live debate on the centre...
The standoff between Iran and the United States has currently reached stalemate. Iranian hopes to use control of the Strait of Hormuz as a lever to...
Newmarket trainer James Fanshawe is a patient man and he has resisted the temptation to run his stable star KIND OF BLUE since he turned in a...
One route into the thorny question of J.R.R. Tolkien’s politics comes courtesy of Giorgia Meloni. Scarcely a profile of the Italian Prime Minister...
Readers with a nervous disposition should turn the page because I’m going to be sprinkling the C-word across the next few paragraphs. It’s still...
I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the...
Shanghaiing, the practice of drugging and kidnapping men on the US West Coast for service on ships bound for China, was made a federal offence in...
The latest statement from Maria Zakharova, the reliably acerbic spokeswoman of the Russian Foreign Ministry, has generated considerable interest and...
Like any freelance writer I’ve taken on some tough gigs. I wrote a book about Paris Hilton. I interviewed the hardman footballer Julian...
England’s cricketers are developing a reputation, though not for sporting prowess. Despite dominating the Pakistanis at Headingley, the humiliation...
We’ve had three announcements this week that paint a worrying picture for the job prospects of young people. First, the job search website...
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When the Cold War ended and the main rationale for enormous stockpiles of nuclear weapons largely disappeared,...
Last night revealed another set of outstanding results from Nvidia. Its quarterly revenues were up by 105 per cent year-on-year, comfortably ahead of...
The ugly scenes in Middlesbrough over the last week would not look out of place in a war zone. In the early hours of Saturday, five youths and two...
Ridley Scott’s post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars is his third film in four years after Napoleon (disjointedly strange) and Gladiator II (not very...
My, how other so-called legacy acts must envy the Cure. There are plenty of bands of 40 or 50 years standing where the original fanbase brings along...
How the Other Half Loves is the play that established Alan Ayckbourn’s name as a writer of farce. Frank and Fiona, a posh, sophisticated couple,...
I was in the most south-westerly pub in Britain, the Turk’s Head, on the Scilly island of St Agnes (population: 75) when I noticed a poster...
Those lights! Thinking back on The Galloping Cure, Missy Mazzoli’s new opera for the Edinburgh International Festival, that’s what lingers:...
The competition must be pretty stiff for ‘World’s worst airport to be caught with drugs in your baggage’: Bogota? Miami? Singapore? Ciudad de la...
The final boss of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, who’s called the Champion (they could have tried harder), is up front about his philosophy....
I’m keen on a Plan B. My father, Norman the Knicker King, reared us in trembling terror of ending up ‘on Carey Street’ (erstwhile home of the...
Looking back on it, apart from this year’s wildfires, the stultifying heat of high summer in Provence isn’t so bad if you accept that the time to...
Readers with a nervous disposition should turn the page because I’m going to be sprinkling the C-word across the next few paragraphs. It’s still...
Margaret Thatcher famously told the Commons in 1988 that ‘there is no way in which one can buck the market’. She meant that it would have been...
Proust can keep his soggy madeleine. For me the word ‘Prague’ is a trigger of memory like no other. It stirs me up like some plaintive half-heard...
In case you missed it (well done, if so), last week Will Self wrote an extraordinary rant on Substack attacking various journalists for how they wrote...
If Andy Burnham has a golden rule, it seems to be this: do the opposite of Keir Starmer. The new Prime Minister has made a habit of differentiating...
A little while back I came across a copy of Ted Hughes’s Laureate poems which had an inscription to some friends. Inside was an unpublished squib by...
William T. Vollmann’s subject is 9/11. Always is, always was. Even before the attacks happened, they were somehow his thing. An Afghanistan Picture...
Is popular music truly an art form? This question has never met a straightforward answer, either from the musicians themselves or the public, and it...
Here’s a quiz for you. On the third floor of the New York Public Library is a vast mural painted by Edward Laning in the 1930s. It’s called ‘The...
‘Cheltenham Symphonies’, they used to call them – a catch-all term for the kind of large-scale, traditionally inclined postwar works that found...
A 20-year-old Chinese researcher dressed in a red crayfish costume has become a symbol of Beijing’s ambition. At a scientific conference in Paris...
America has what might be the best evidence for life on Mars. NASA’s Perseverance rover has gathered rock samples that could contain compelling...
I sometimes feel like I have lost ten IQ points per child. If my husband and I ever have a fourth, I might have to quit writing altogether and find a...
The stage lights flicker. The MAGA faithful whoop at the first tinkle of piano keys. They’ve been here a hundred times. They know what’s coming....
In popular mythology, America is the land that innovates while Europe regulates. America gets on with things while Europe prevaricates by allowing...
It isn’t long now until the joyous day that Harry and Meghan once more make Britain their home, but several aspects of their return are still...