T he hint of tax cuts made by Gordon Brown this week is a piece of political audacity which could only be matched were the Conservatives suddenly to commit themselves to the...

Festival in Liverpool. As well as my own talk the organisers asked me to fill in for the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had cancelled at the last minute. This gave...

about political correctness ( It’s a PC World , Hodder and Stoughton) with an anecdote about the Queen Mother. She told him, in private, that the EEC would never work, because...

MONDAY I can’t believe people are saying that tax cutting is Gordon’s idea! This is an unbelievable cheek!! Dave has been banging on about cutting taxes for three years now....

After a week of clamorous competition between the parties over tax cuts, Fraser Nelson offers a guide to paying for them: a programme of spending cuts that would preserve core...

of hope conquering belief. The journey few believed would be completed. One man — aided by the most advanced viral campaign in history, and carried along on a mantra...

Elliot Wilson says that the near-collapse of the Islamic state should focus minds in this country, which is inextricably linked to Pakistan. Its implosion would stoke extremism...

Susan Hill recalls how much she relied on her health visitor and bemoans the decline of this once-universal service: the victim of bureaucratic ‘targeting’ and government...

Venetia Thompson , who has never taken the drug, was shocked to discover a stash in her house. What to do? Her friends’ response was a collective shrug as if it were nothing...

This is bad news for the Conservatives, who have always feasted on US right-of-centre ideas, says James Forsyth . But the GOP can learn from the Cameroons Cambridge,...

of view, the Soviet Union won the Cold War in Britain hands down should attend a conference organised for doctors about impending organisational changes in the National Health...

My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers , but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. I’d been reading the very...

‘It’s wrong to pay for sex’ Lloyd Evans I t was back to basics at Intelligence Squared last Tuesday as we debated the morality of prostitution. Newspaper executive...

Sir: Charles Moore has really talked himself into a corner this time with regard to his pathological dislike of the BBC (The Spectator’s Notes, 8 November). Like many other...

Sir: Today, in Ipswich, young girl cadets were selling poppies. I bought one. ‘Would you like a pin to go with it?’ ‘Yes please.’ ‘We can’t actually give you a pin...

Sir: I write this on a sunny Sydney afternoon, not far from Hunters Hill, listening to the shrieks, carols, twitterings and scoldings of the local bird population that now...

Sir: Sinclair McKay gives an excellent introduction to William Le Queux as the forgotten pioneer of the modern spy novel (‘A quantum of respect’, 1 November). Also neglected...

Sir: Why should anyone be surprised (‘No fiscal Holy Grail’, 8 November) that Gordo discarded the Golden Rules? Have they forgotten that HM Treasury discarded our gold...

Sir: In his, to my mind, patronising remarks about Barack Obama (‘his blackness seems skin deep’) Charles Moore seems to regard ‘the intelligence, the historical sweep and...

Sir: I feel sorry for Lisa Hilton (‘La dolce vita is a myth’, 8 November). Milan is not really Italy: the Romans called the region Cisalpine Gaul, and all those years...

T hey say that Eskimos have 50 words for ‘snow’. Like a lot of the things they say, this isn’t true, but should be. Right now, I’m a good few thousand miles from both...

N ot long before he died, Simon Gray and I discussed the extraordinary paradox: why was it that New Labour does everything in its power to discourage smoking and everything in...

It is clear that the ferocious competition of interests and passions, the mad rule of money, and materialism as the measure of all things — in short, the free market, released...

I can attest from personal experience that, if you try to talk about the free market on today’s university campuses, you will be buried in an avalanche of criticism of...

Most of us are consumers who try to get the best possible deals in the market. Most of us are also moral beings who try to do the right things in our communities and societies....

There is little consensus on what is moral, let alone on what corrodes morality. A man of faith measures moral character by one’s ability to abide by the demands of his God. A...

Free markets corrode some aspects of character while enhancing others. Whether the result is good, on balance, depends on how one envisions a good life. Much also depends on...

James Doran assesses the qualities needed to be Obama’s Treasury secretary at a time of unprecedented crisis, and wonders whether the front-runners measure up New York A s...

Richard Northedge W ithout an Inuit thesaurus I have no way of checking how many words the Eskimos really have for snow, but each day’s newspapers reveal just how large a...

Brussels says no but Kylie says yes I t was Kylie Minogue who made me think Turkey and Europe might just about be ready for each other. There was the pop poppet — well,...

R ichard Price’s meaty and fabulously enjoyable police procedural, Lush Life (Bloomsbury, £12.99), is a book I have pressed on a lot of friends. The new Robert B. Parker,...

W ith The Private Patient (Faber, £18.99) P. D. James has written a book which, for masterly evocation of place and understanding of human nature, is as good as anything she...

M ick Imlah’s exploration of the culture of Scottishness, The Lost Leader (Faber, £9.99), is brilliantly witty and intellectually supple, a worthy winner of this year’s...

A s I spent a large part of the year writing, my actual reading was rather restricted, and limited to fact rather than fiction. I very much enjoyed Ferdinand Mount’s Cold...

J eremy Lewis, biographer, critic and former publisher, has perpetrated a third enjoyable volume of memoirs, Grub Street Irregular (HarperCollins, £20). He writes so well, with...

M y Father’s Roses by Nancy Kohner (Hodder, £18.99) recalls the bourgeois, non-observant Jewish world of central Europe from which Ms Kohner’s father, an émigré to...

T he tiny independent firm of London Books, founded last year, specialises in reprints of hard-boiled thrillers from the interwar years. Two I particularly enjoyed were James...

I n the winter of 1896, on a barrow in Charing Cross Road, a mid-17th-century manuscript found by a scholar was eventually proved to be by Thomas Traherne. This was Centuries of...

I was excited to see the publication this year of Peter Schjeldahl’s Let’s See: Writings on Art from the New Yorker (Thames & Hudson, £18.95). Schjeldahl’s is not typical...

T he Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales , (University of Wales Press, £65) for its scholarship, also for its sense of proportion, as in comments such as this on Roy Jenkins,...

I n the fashionable rush to re-read Keynes, Galbraith and Friedman on the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression, don’t neglect an emerging batch of modern writers on the current...

T wo biographies changed my view this year of people who already command a wide appeal. William Oddie’s Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy (Oxford, £25) gives a deeper...

F or Ferdinand Mount, in his masterly memoir Cold Cream (Bloomsbury, £20), memory’s madeleine is the cosmetic his titled mother advertised, with unorthodox audacity, in...

T he best book of the year for me was The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (Fourth Estate, £20), a revelatory account of the rise of modern music. Two books which disappointed were...

C an Any Mother Help Me? by Jenna Bailey (Faber, £16.99) is the story of the Cooperative Correspondance Club , a secret magazine started in 1935, in which a group of women...

F or Alan Bennett fans, a rare treat is in store this season. His former Oxford college, Exeter, has produced a selection from the Junior Common Room (JCR) suggestion book of...

Charles Sprawson D ULWICH C OLLEGE : A H ISTORY , 1616-2008 by Jan Piggott Dulwich College Enterprises, £24, pp. 408, ISBN 9780953949328 T he only man from Dulwich College I...

Summer peels him, his last rice-paper skin, Who plays his throat like a tin whistle, Stops the brown hole with yellowed finger, And makes a note like a tin whistle — Wanting...

Adam Nicolson N OTES FROM W ALNUT T REE F ARM by Roger Deakin, edited by Alison Hastie and Terence Blacker Hamish Hamilton, £20, pp. 309, ISBN 9780241144206 ✆ £16 (plus...

Byron Rogers A LL IN THE M IND by Alastair Campbell Hutchinson, £17.99, pp. 297, ISBN 9780091925789 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 I t was a good idea. You start...

Linsey McGoey PHILANTHROCAPITALISM by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green A & C Black, £16.99, pp. 304, ISBN 9781408111529 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 S ome say...

Philip Ziegler M Y T HREE F ATHERS by Bill Patten Public Affairs, £16.99, pp. 352, ISBN 9780571216932 T he mother to m a t c h Bill Patten’s t h r e e fathers was Susan Mary...

Training the bellows on a splinter of sparks one early morning of poxed snow a low moon malingering in blue-haggard light and every cell recoiling in the hollow of the year on a...

P.J. Kavanagh A P RICKLY A FFAIR by Hugh Warwick Allen Lane, £14.99, pp. 279, ISBN 978184614065 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 A t a time when most of his...

Andro Linklater T HE C HICAGOAN : A L OST M AGAZINE OF THE J AZZ A GE edited by Neil Harris University of Chicago Press, £34, pp. 385, ISBN 9780226-17618. ✆ £27.20 (plus...

Christopher Fildes T HE A SCENT OF M ONEY by Niall Fergusson Penguin, £25, pp. 441, ISBN 9781846141065 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 N ew from Niall Ferguson: the...

M alcolm Lowry liked to quote the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset, who saw Man’s life as a sort of novel, made up as you go along. Certainly there are times when life...

F elicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson was a drug dealer, with a five-year stretch for murder behind her and no nice future ahead. But then a random meeting in a Baltimore nightclub, with...

Andrew Lambirth Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque: Aimé Maeght and His Artists Royal Academy, until 2 January 2009 Sponsored by BNP Paribas T he role played by dealers in...

Michael Tanner Elektra Royal Opera House For You Linbury Studio T he revival at the Royal Opera of Strauss’s Elektra in the production by Charles Edwards, who is also...

Lloyd Evans Yard Gal Oval House Lucky Seven Hampstead L ast week I saw a little-known play, Yard Gal , which I’m pretty sure is a classic. Written ten years ago by Rebecca...

Deborah Ross The Baader Meinhof Complex 18, Key Cities T he Baader Meinhof Complex is, well, just horrible really. Horrible, horrible, horrible and for those of you who are...

Charles Spencer I had what reformed alkies call a moment of clarity last week. On one of my regular trawls through the Amazon website, I clicked the One-day 1-Click button and...

Giannandrea Poesio Romeo & Juliet, On Motifs of shakespeare Mark Morris Dance Group Barbican L ike child prodigies, enfants terribles do not last forever. As both epithets...

Kate Chisholm T here’s been a lot of huffing and puffing about the BBC’s World Service in the past week as cuts were announced in the Russian service. Isn’t it a bad time...

James Delingpole Y ou’re a middle-class Pole living in modest bourgeois comfort in a detached house in the handsome Austro–Hungarian city of Lwow in 1939 when there’s a...

Robin Oakley ‘L ook here, Sunshine,’ I remember Eric Morecambe responding to a raised eyebrow from André Previn about the comedian’s musical efforts. ‘I am playing the...

Taki New York E lection nights in the Bagel were always spent at 73 East 73rd Street, in Bill and Pat Buckley’s house, more often than not described as palatial by...

Jeremy Clarke L ast Thursday I was volunteer driver for the day for a Heartbeaters’ outing. Heartbeaters is a local exercise and social club for people recovering from heart...

Alex James I t was a rainy morning on Friday when I woke up warm as toast in a small castle in Northumberland, surrounded on all sides as far as the eye could see by the...

can. The falling pound means that the cost of wine is certain to increase next year. The trade is fiercely competitive in a genteel kind of way, and most merchants have been...

It’s official: make-up is recession-proof, says Lindy Woodhead B e honest now. Isn’t there just the teeniest bit of schadenfreude in the hearts and minds of those of us who...

(THE ONE IT WAS CREATED IN.) P AUL Signac was first seduced by the Côte d’Azur when he moored his yacht in St Tropez during May 1892. His enthusiastic reports attracted...

‘W ow, that’s brave,’ said John Kampfner, the former editor of the New Statesman . ‘I’d never do that.’ I had just told him I’d agreed to be on Have I Got News for...

It is a relief that there is one magazine in which one will not be hauled up on a charge of libel or sexual harassment for writing that Barack Obama, the President-elect of the...

T he most powerful storyline of the US election, which the fawning media did nothing to challenge, was the idea that Barack Obama was an underdog who had miraculously triumphed...

Q. I am 44 and, for various reasons, have been single for about five years, but I now have a girlfriend. When people ring to invite me to dinner, I would like to say, ‘I have...