G ordon Brown’s dramatic and humiliating climbdown on the abolition of the 10p tax rate averted at least one disaster: the Prime Minister was facing a knife-edge Commons vote...

site of his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech on Sunday, a rather clever idea dreamed up by my colleagues at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Kamal Ahmed and...

S pend just a few minutes on the campaign trail for next week’s local elections and it suddenly becomes clear why Labour MPs got into such a mutinous mood. When they happily...

rate of income tax. It added complication, and Gordon Brown is right to get rid of it, though wrong to charge income tax on people so low on the income scale. But you cannot...

MONDAY What on earth is wrong with the general public at the moment? Why, according to the so-called opinion polls, do more people like Alistair Darling than Gids? Have they...

Boris Johnson has confounded his critics, says Matthew d’Ancona . The contest will go to the wire, but our man has proved himself to be both shrewd enough and serious enough...

Norman Stone on the dramatic life and death of Ali Kemal, one-time interior minister of Turkey and our mayoral candidate’s forebear B oris Johnson is one eighth Turkish. His...

Jack Valero , a director of Opus Dei, says that even Dan Brown would be hard-pushed to invent the strange and circuitous business of complaining to the BBC T he last time Opus...

through the front door. I can’t disguise my confusion. ‘As in Tom and Barbara. You know, from The Good Life .’ I don’t get it, at first. I still think of myself as this...

So we complained. We wanted a little apology, that’s all, and a firm purpose of amendment: a three-second statement read at the graveyard of the news hour, perhaps, a flash of...

Kelvin MacKenzie says that his fury over an extortionate hike in parking prices drove him to stand for election to Elmbridge Borough Council I t was a strange place for the red...

When transferring money overseas, don’t think you will get the best exchange rate from your high street bank. There is an alternative and it will save you money. Changing and...

Rod Liddle says that our pursuit of property as investment has been the most repulsive and soul-destroying aspect of contemporary British culture I f you take that excellent map...

two immovables of human existence. In modern life, however, there is a third: drivel, from which, try as one might, it is now impossible to escape. I concede, of course, that...

Hillary Clinton’s big win in the Pennsylvania primary has drawn attention to four main weaknesses in Barack Obama’s appeal, says James Forsyth H illary Clinton did not have...

Sir: Your musings (‘England Rides Again’, 19 April) upon the complexity of being English, Scottish or British have, I fear, the relevance of the archangels upon the...

Sir: You may not have realised it, but asking Mohamed Al Fayed to contribute to your survey (‘So what is England?’, 19 April) showed an important English trait —...

Sir: Alex James writes (Slow Life, 19 April) of the joys of orbiting the spire of Canterbury Cathedral, ‘the static needle of the steeple pointing quietly up’. In my years...

Sir: It was a delight to receive the St George’s Day special issue and to read what were, for the most part, well-balanced and interesting articles about England and the...

Sir: In his Spectator’s Notes of 19 April, Charles Moore writes that John Buchan’s idea of ‘Old English’ is ‘historical rubbish (who were these Old English who were...

Sir: While Fraser Nelson’s column (Politics, 19 April) provided an excellent political analysis regarding England and Scotland, it made no reference to the potential...

Sir: Igor Toronyi-Lalic (Arts, 19 April) correctly raises the question of fanaticism of some ideological movements. According to him, in the 1920s the USSR was advocating...

I t’s always happening. It happened again last Friday. I had finished my Times column for Saturday and, taking advantage of the two hours left of daylight, fetched the...

I t is good fun to imagine historical conjunctions. Suppose, for example, Winston Churchill had done Desert Island Discs . What would he have chosen? His favourite song of all...

Neil Barnett says hedge funds should be forced to reveal their trading secrets, to deter them from the kind of market manipulation that has recently hit Icelandic banks Y ou...

T he abolition of the 10p starter rate of income tax in Gordon Brown’s last Budget has a special significance in recent Spectator history: coming only a month after our move...

Sam Leith H UMAN S MOKE by Nicholson Baker Simon & Schuster, £20, pp. 566, ISBN 9781847372741 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 I n July 1940, Hitler issued what...

Andro Linklater K IERON S MITH , B OY by James Kelman Hamish Hamilton, £18.99, pp. 422, ISBN 9780241142417 ✆ £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 I n his take on the...

Robin Hanbury-Tenison T REE OF R IVERS : T HE S TORY OF THE A MAZON by John Hemming Thames & Hudson, £20, pp. 368, ISBN 9780670915804 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655...

Zenga Longmore T HE M AKING OF M R H AI ’ S DAUGHTER: B ECOMING B RITISH by Yasmin Hai Virago, £14.99, pp. 334, ISBN9781844082698 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655...

Claudia FitzHerbert O NCE U PON A T IME IN THE N ORTH by Philip Pullman David Fickling Books, £9.99, pp. 95, ISBN 9780385614320 ✆ £7.99 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 O...

Leo McKinstry K EN : T HE U PS AND D OWNS OF K EN L IVINGSTONE by Andrew Hosken Arcadia Books, £15.99, pp. 435, ISBN 9781905147724 ✆ £12.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655...

William Brett B ORN Y ESTERDAY : T HE N EWS AS A N OVEL by Gordon Burn Faber, £7.99, pp. 214, ISBN 9780571240265 ✆ £6.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 I t’s startling...

Allan Massie I N THE S HADOW OF THE M AGIC M OUNTAIN by Andrea Weiss University of Chicago Press, £14.50, pp. 272, ISBN 9780226886725 ✆ £11.60 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429...

David Pryce-Jones A D ANGERoUS L IAISoN : S IMoNE DE B EAUvoIR AND J EAN -P AUL S ARTRE by Carole Seymour-Jones Century, £20, pp. 574, ISBN 9781844138227 ✆ £16 (plus £2.45...

Theodore Dalrymple T HE D iSRESPECT A GENDA : O R H OW THE W RONG K iND OF N iCENESS iS M AKiNG U S W EAK AND U NHAPPY by Lincoln Allison Social Affairs Unit, £10, pp.120,...

Henrietta Bredin talks to Sally Burgess about taking on the role of Carmen J ust as dancers are fortunate if they have especially long legs and strong, flexible feet, there are...

Andrew Lambirth Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his circle Ben Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Road, London NW8, until 8 June I t seems that Isaac Rosenberg thought of...

Lloyd Evans Small Change Donmar War and Peace, I and II Hampstead O h my God. Did that really happen? I knew nothing about Peter Gill’s 1976 play, Small Change , before...

Michael Tanner The Minotaur Royal Opera F or the first time in the 12 years that I have been reviewing opera weekly, I have been to the first performance of a masterpiece. The...

Deborah Ross Persepolis 12A, London and key cities P ersepolis , an animated feature about coming of age in Iran, is kind of interesting and is kind of original but its...

Robin Holloway N othing is sacred or unchanging. One of Radio Three’s most reliable sources of musical pleasure, the weekly Saturday opera relay from the Metropolitan in New...

Kate Chisholm S omething so weird has happened to the way we live now that Radio Two has decided it needs to dedicate a week’s programming to Let’s Talk About Sex . It’s...

Simon Hoggart S o it’s goodbye to Foyle’s War (Sunday, ITV), for the time being at least. The series seems to have been cancelled not because it was no good; it was, for a...

Ursula Buchan I n the 19th century, the painting of flowers was mainly the preserve of maiden ladies with too much time on their hands, whose watercolours would be framed by...

Taki New York I t obviously came from above — the order, that is — because I have never seen such perfect temperatures and clearer skies than for the Pope’s visit. And...

Jeremy Clarke E very day that I can, I take an elderly, obese, arthritic collie called Joe for a walk. I take him out because he’s a likeable old chap, and his owner,...

Aidan Hartley Nairobi I want to say Kenya is a victim of negative press. Shady characters called bloggers are nicknaming the President’s new Peace cabinet of ministers ‘Ali...

Melissa Kite I f television bosses ever get really desperate for cheap viewing, they could always follow me with a hand-held camera as I pigheadedly attempt to drive my car...

Sarah Standing falls for the mystifying science of Biontology ‘M ust be your lucky morn ing, ladies,’ the Southern ticket inspector unctuously announced. ‘I’m going to...

Rachel Johnson rarely gets out of her comfort zone: loungewear I have long cherished an — admittedly rather bizarre — fantasy. It centres on the world’s best-dressed...

Boom at the top Sophie Brodie finds that the high end of the market is holding firm P resent-wrapping, flower-arranging, hair-dressing are, for most of us, incidental pastimes....

Cathy Strongman S ince the government announced in its 2007 green paper that it intended to make all new homes carbon-neutral by 2016, designs for snazzy green homes and...

Ross Clark I have been trying all week to work out exactly what an ‘eco-town’ is, and have finally come to the conclusion that the term is derived from Umberto Eco, the...

I’m on the edge of doing something rather shocking. Quite a few readers have written to me about the phrase for free . It is monstrous, ungrammatical and, more annoyingly,...

well, a painful and often expensive business. I knew my cavalier investment in Bernard Hopkins to beat Joe Calzaghe on Saturday night, despite Hopkins at 43 being almost as old...

from China. It is the most hideously frightful, huge, garish, golden ‘money’ cat with a waving paw which he has specifically asked me to put in ‘my’ drawing room (along...

year on the Sunday of the Mayday Bank Holiday for her birthday, often of up to 30 friends of mixed ages. We then have a delicious and congenial lunch at her house. I have been...

next to me had an alarm on his mobile which maddeningly went off every five minutes, yet he slept through it. It was a nonstop train so there was no question of his missing his...