favorites

NHS Scotland: call bearded trans staff ‘women’

It seems that NHS Scotland still hasn’t learned the lessons from the Sandie Peggie furore. Now it turns out that a ‘cultural humility’ training...

yesterday 10

Steerpike

The greatest paintings are always full of important unimportant things

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings chosen...

yesterday 30

Craig Raine

Cartoonish, sub-Armando Iannucci comic caper: Mickey 17 reviewed

Mickey 17 is the latest film from the South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and made Snowpiercer and Okja. It’s...

yesterday 10

Deborah Ross

Why possum beats cashmere

In 1990, an exotic Swiss-Canadian teenager of purportedly Habsburgian lineage descended on Cambridge in a cloud of cashmere. His wardrobe was...

yesterday 10

Justin Marozzi

The true birthplace of the Renaissance

The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him. There is connection; there is...

yesterday 10

Joanna Moorhead

The anti-genius of William McGonagall, history’s worst poet

‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘shall outlive this powerful rhyme.’ To be a great poet, as the Stratford man...

yesterday 10

Sam Leith

Trump’s pausing of intelligence sharing will hit Ukraine hard

The United States’s decision to suspend all intelligence sharing with Kyiv is a less visible but almost as serious and more immediate blow to...

yesterday 10

Mark Galeotti

A dancing, weightless garland of gems: Stephen Hough’s piano concerto reviewed

Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse into the world of...

yesterday 10

Richard Bratby

Anjelica Huston is comprehensively upstaged in the BBC’s new Agatha Christie

Coincidentally, two of this week’s big new dramas began with a fourth wall-busting declaration of their narrative methods. At the start of Towards...

yesterday 10

James Walton

Stop scoffing food on trains!

I’m on the 10.45 slow train to Ipswich. It’s not even lunchtime, yet everyone around me is already gorging on food. The corpulent man opposite is...

yesterday 10

James Innes-Smith

Is Reform serious about stopping the boats?

On no issue are Britain’s established political parties so compromised as on efforts to stop illegal immigrants gatecrashing our borders via the...

yesterday 10

Patrick O’Flynn

The Gen-Z fliers obsessed with maximising their air miles

Oscar, 26, joins me on Google Meet from Buenos Aires, having arrived earlier that day from New York – by way of a few hours in Mexico City and...

yesterday 10

Zoe Strimpel

In defence of red velvet cake

I will admit to having been dismissive of red velvet cake in the past, considering it to be bland in flavour and garish in colour. It tended to...

yesterday 10

Olivia Potts

Will Hamas take Trump’s Gaza ultimatum seriously?

‘“Shalom Hamas” means Hello and Goodbye – You can choose.’ So began Donald Trump’s furious social media post, an ultimatum wrapped in a linguistic...

yesterday 10

Jonathan Sacerdoti

A tribute to Blair Wallace, a hero of the Troubles

The names of leading republicans like Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Bobby Sands are well known, but how many in Great Britain can identify a...

yesterday 10

Dean Godson

How the Democrats fell into Trump’s trap

Fox News’s Brit Hume, one of America’s most respected political analysts, and a man more given to wry scepticism than to partisanship or hyperbole,...

yesterday 10

Irwin Stelzer

Rupert Lowe’s warning shot to Nigel Farage

There is a striking interview in today’s Daily Mail between Andrew Pierce and Rupert Lowe. The Reform MP is known for speaking his mind and he...

yesterday 10

James Heale

Books / A war of words: circulating forbidden literature behind the Iron Curtain

If James Bond, now in American hands, re-emerges refreshed as an agent of the CIA, then it will be a homecoming of sorts, given that his creator...

yesterday 10

Nicholas Shakespeare

Why is the NHS pushing pregnant women towards sterilisation?

It was a routine antenatal appointment. I’d done it twice before and knew the format. The obstetrician runs through the risks of an elective...

yesterday 10

Flora Watkins

Moral liability / The weakness of Donald Trump

Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere aside...

yesterday 10

Rod Liddle

Laboured point / Why is the NHS pushing pregnant women towards sterilisation?

It was a routine antenatal appointment. I’d done it twice before and knew the format. The obstetrician runs through the risks of an elective...

yesterday 10

Flora Watkins

Fascist shaman / Jonathan Bowden: my eccentric school friend who became a far-right hero

When my old school, Presentation College, Reading, was demolished a decade ago, the Labour council desperately searched for famous old boys after...

yesterday 20

Damian Thompson

Dirty deal: what Trump really wants from Ukraine’s natural resources

In Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Blondie, played by Clint Eastwood, and Tuco, played by Eli Wallach, are...

yesterday 100

Niall Ferguson And Nick Kumleben

The Huw Edwards BBC pay saga shows how ridiculous the licence fee is

Did anyone really expect Huw Edwards to return the £200,000 he ‘earned’ – or, more correctly, was paid – between his arrest in November 2023...

yesterday 30

Ross Clark

Could ethnic minority criminals soon find it easier to avoid jail?

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has accused his Labour counterpart Shabana Mahmood of not believing in ‘equality under the law’ and ‘...

yesterday 20

David Shipley

Brian Cox’s Bach has to be heading for Broadway

The Score is a fine example of meat-and-potatoes theatre. Simple plotting, big characters, terrific speeches and a happy ending. The protagonist,...

yesterday 10

Lloyd Evans

Finneas has little to offer without his sister Billie Eilish

No truth is more self-evident than that there are those whose best emerges only when they are paired with others: Lennon and McCartney, Morecambe...

yesterday 10

Michael Hann

Politics / Starmer is the unlikely hero of the hour. Can it last?

When Donald Trump addressed Congress this week, he declared he was ‘just getting started’. His words will not have soothed politicians in the UK,...

yesterday 10

Katy Balls

The Wiki Man / The case for a daily limit on social media posts

A few years ago, my old school magazine featured a pupil’s brief account of a geography field trip. Before the magazine was mailed out, someone had...

yesterday 20

Rory Sutherland

Macron’s late-night address will infuriate Trump and Vance

Emmanuel Macron spoke to his people last night in a television address and told them that the future of Ukraine cannot be decided by America and...

yesterday 10

Gavin Mortimer

Right turn / The MAGA movement is wrong on Ukraine

How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right – when it comes to Ukraine? To begin to grapple...

yesterday 60

Douglas Murray

Will the EU ever get tough on defence?

European leaders are in Brussels today for an emergency summit on defence, and the future of both Ukraine and the continent. In a further attempt...

yesterday 8

Lisa Haseldine

Watch: Tice forgets names of Reform defectors

Oh dear. Poor Richard Tice is the latest politician to have an embarrassing memory lapse. During his first trip to Scotland of 2025, the Boston and...

yesterday 0

Steerpike

Reform or die / Rupert Lowe’s warning shot to Nigel Farage

There is a striking interview in today’s Daily Mail between Andrew Pierce and Rupert Lowe. The Reform MP is known for speaking his mind and he...

yesterday 0

James Heale

The anti-Reagan / Trump has shifted the world in Putin’s favour

The verbal pummelling of Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House last week was an ugly moment of bitter truth. We saw the West tearing itself apart...

yesterday 0

The Spectator

Points of honour / The Gen-Z fliers obsessed with maximising their air miles

Oscar, 26, joins me on Google Meet from Buenos Aires, having arrived earlier that day from New York – by way of a few hours in Mexico City and...

yesterday 0

Zoe Strimpel

Should the Scottish Tories ignore the Reform threat?

What do the Tories do with a problem like Reform? Kemi Badenoch’s party in Westminster has some time to consider this, with over four years to go...

yesterday 0

Andy Maciver

Is Jonathan Powell scared of scrutiny?

It’s a turbulent time for the Western world, but Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government doesn’t seem to be taking things all that seriously. At...

previous day 10

Steerpike

Can multiculturalism be fixed?

The rape gang scandal that has afflicted Britain compels us to review the assumptions that underlie multiculturalism. It’s time for us in the free...

previous day 30

Jordan Peterson

Sick of it / How Armando Iannucci lost his edge

The BBC celebrated one of its own on Monday night. Armando Iannucci was treated to a fawning retrospective by Alan Yentob, and it opened with a...

previous day 10

Lloyd Evans

Trump’s whirlwind Congress speech infuriated Democrats

Donald Trump’s address to Congress last night was made up of his greatest hits since returning to the Oval Office. Just over six weeks’ worth of...

previous day 10

Kate Andrews

Operation suck up / Trump is a bully but it’s a mistake to stand up to him

Everything they taught you in school is a lie. Carthage was not salted, Canute knew he couldn’t control the tide, Marie Antoinette never said ‘let...

previous day 10

Stephen Daisley

Europe could pay the price for Germany’s debt shake-up

Germany has finally decided to join the party – but Europe may come to regret it. After two decades of limited borrowing and fiscal restraint,...

previous day 10

Matthew Lynn

Europe’s rearmament is off to a feeble start

If there is one silver lining to Donald Trump’s Oval Office bust-up with Volodymyr Zelensky last Friday, it is that Europe is finally getting...

previous day 10

Lisa Haseldine

Old Schools attack / Cambridge’s Palestine vandals must be expelled

Frustrated by a High Court injunction that prohibits protestors from occupying University buildings in Cambridge so as to block a degree ceremony on...

previous day 10