The only written words of mine that have ever had a practical effect on the world appeared in my review of Alexander McCall Smith’s book The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Mine was the first review in the national ...

If cheating is the cancer of sport, losing has to be its halitosis. I stunk up the joint in Amsterdam last week, and even managed to be thrown (a first) for my troubles. Winners, for some strange reason, never have an ...

The readers’ Spectator party was as always a swell affair, with longtime subscribers politely mingling with ne’er-do-wells like myself, the former having cakes and drinking tea, the latter desperately raiding the ...

When searching for Islamic terrorists in England, avoid the mosques and head straight to the universities. Most of Britain’s homegrown terrorists get the all-important leg-up to “exploding beardie” status at the ...

PATMOS—Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, the monkeypox plague is targeting gays, record heat waves are crippling Europe and America, mass shootings ...

The omens were bad from the beginning. The day after the IOC awarded the 2012 Olympics to London and while Mayor Ken Livingstone’s bidding team was celebrating in Singapore, four bombs exploded on London Transport. It ...

The politicians are beginning to shuffle into place for next year’s presidential contest. (Or out of place: Haley Barbour announced this week that he won’t try for the Republican nomination.) So whom do we ...

The American victory in the Ryder Cup was convincing and thoroughly deserved. They played brilliantly, none more so than Patrick Reed and Phil Mickelson. Mickelson may spray his drives wildly, but the quality of his ...

Here we go again, another Christmas issue and it seems only two weeks ago that I filed for the last one. This is a very happy time of year: parties galore, lots of love for our fellow man, and happiness all around. Mind ...

Architecture is not politics, but it's relevant to politics because we create our physical environment in the image of what we believe about the world generally. We need to make sense of our surroundings. If they're too ...

The Week’s Most Flummering, Mummering, and Summering Headlines DARK SIDE OF THE GOON The leftist war on sunlight continues! Last year, lefties in politics, the media, and (pseudo)science scoffed at the idea that sunshine ...

“You look like Van Gogh. Why don’t you cut off an ear?” With such cruelty I stopped the verbal diarrhea of a painter who was complaining, incapable of swimming with sharks in formalin. I admit my responsibility in ...

OK. Things are heating up in the old continent after a boiling summer. October will be the cruelest month, as the poet didn’t exactly say, but it might also be crunch time. Europeans seem more sophisticated than the ...

Don"€™t you hate it when actors get involved in politics? I do, and not only because I usually disagree with their views. I hate it because it ruins the rich fantasy life that actors enjoy in my mind. That old maxim ...

Annual Excessive Gay Pride Month is here, and, as emblems of the Rainbow Reich are forcibly hoisted everywhere like sodomite swastikas, it seems to many as if the world has gone absolutely insane. But might there be some ...

Does being an early childhood educator turn you into a meddlesome nitwit, or are meddlesome nitwits instinctively drawn to careers in early childhood education? It's a tough call. One recent example of the WE KNOW WHAT's ...

Professional politicians are, according to me, such loathsome, repulsive critters that non-politicians are always appealing by ...

If Oxford is the home of lost causes, California appears to be the Quonset hut of stupid ones. The latest to excite municipal legislators’ brains (in San Francisco and Santa Monica, anyway—Barstow and Fresno appear ...

Don’t be fooled by The Donald. Take it from one who knows: I’m a South Jersey gal who was raised on the outskirts of Atlantic City in the looming shadow of Trump’s towers. All through my childhood, casino ...

GSTAAD—Writing in the Spectator diary, Lady Antonia Fraser, widow of Harold Pinter, recounts how then vice president Lyndon Johnson stipulated at a Jamaican party that he would dance as long as no words were exchanged. ...

Why such a sourpuss, Joy-Ann? On the whole, life and MSNBC are treating you pretty well. And yet, over the last 10 years, you have complained pretty much nonstop about how badly you, and "people who look like [you]," are ...

This story could bring tears to your eyes. In Baltimore, Maryland, there are 23 schools in which not one single student tested "proficient in math." Can we all agree these are schools that aren't proficient in teaching ...

In keeping with its world-famous heartlessness, the United States has defunded UNESCO. The world's innocent children are unjustly suffering even as you read this. Such has been the predictable cry of outrage heard ever ...

I had a good talk with my NBF, Owen Matthews, at the Spectator writers’ party, agreeing on the two subjects we discussed: Russia and women. I won’t exaggerate the enormity of our aggregate knowledge—and the way we ...