H ere are some brute facts: the Conservative party still has fewer seats than Michael Foot won in the 1983 general election. To win an overall majority in the House of Commons,...

MONDAY Dave says we are absolutely not withdrawing the whip from poor Mr Conway. If we do such a thing, where will it end? Which MP hasn’t at some point given their son a...

closer, Fred Kindall steps up the training. You need to be a fit man to publish a novel these days. ‘It’s good to be alive,’ Fred exults, as I lie on the floor of his gym...

Y ears from now, when the downfall of Peter Hain has been reduced to a Trivial Pursuit question standing between players and a yellow wedge, the name of Derek Conway will still...

Street shows that the office of Prime Minister is swelling fit to burst. Everyone says that the man with the new post, Jeremy Heywood, is excellent. Nothing is known against him...

James Forsyth says that the Republican nomination is all but settled, and McCain has achieved a stunning comeback. If the Democrats want the White House, they must pick Obama as...

Tim Walker talks to the theatrical veterans Roy Dotrice and Patrick Garland about their long-awaited return to the work of John Aubrey I n a soulless, drafty rehearsal hall just...

Marianne Macdonald says that the crazy bounty nature bestows on gorgeous women can be a curse: a recipe for low confidence and solitary distrust I am always struck, interviewing...

Last time we saw that the currently fashionable buzz-word ‘change’ was anathema to the Romans, because they looked for stability and permanence, and change implied failure....

Stanley Johnson returns to Vietnam four decades after the offensive that shattered American confidence in the war — but reflects that the US went on to win the cultural battle...

Christopher Booker launches his eighth decade in India with a spot of street cricket, a return to his mother’s birthplace and a salute to a country reclaiming its historical...

Rod Liddle says that the ban exemplifies all that is wrong with Labour: nannying piety, control freakery and an endless capacity for lies. What’s more, it’s put him to...

the powers of any modern architect worth his salt to design something even worse. This important truth of the science of aesthetics was borne out recently when I visited Paris...

We’re delighted to announce the winner of our fiendishly difficult general knowledge game, published in the Christmas edition of The Spectator. Our congratulations and a case...

Sir: I was sorry to see that Con Coughlin (‘Agent Brown’s new plan to smash terror’, 26 January) has now joined the likes of poor William Shawcross on the pottier side of...

Sir: Anthony J. Burnet makes two interesting points in his comment on my ‘Economics of Mr Brown’ (Letters, 26 January). The first is that my questioning of the proposed new...

Sir: Pauline Holroyd’s experience regarding choice in NHS referrals (Letters, 19 January) becomes even more frustrating when government targets interfere. I was referred in...

Sir: Atatürk banned the call to prayer in Arabic throughout Turkey as long ago as 1932 (The Spectator’s Notes, 12 January). He decreed that it could henceforth only be in...

Sir: I was reminded by Martin Vander Weyer’s footnote of Hugh Massingberd’s huge appetite and of his extraordinary generosity (Any other business, 26 January). Hugh and I...

Sir: Matthew Parris’s article on the ‘surprising gaps’ the English language has in its vocabulary (Another voice, 19 January), reminds me of all the times I have asked...

T his January Prometheus paid our era a call. Scientists (it was reported at the end of the month) have ‘announced the creation of a synthetic chromosome, knocking down one of...

T he litigation about the death of Princess Diana drags on, to the confusion of most of us, the satisfaction of none, and I imagine to the great distress of her two sons. And...

Neil Collins meets Nigel Annett, who runs Welsh Water — a unique utility company which operates without shareholders and distributes profits back to its customers I t does...

Christopher Fildes M y friend Herbie from the Last National Bank of Boot Hill understood about rogue traders. When another hapless bank owned up to losses ‘due to...

Eric Ellis says the death of Indonesia’s former dictator may spur attempts to recover the loot accumulated by his family T he strangest moment of the elongated théâtre de...

Peter Oborne F LAT E ARTH N Ews by Nick Davies Chatto, £17.99, pp. 408, ISBN 9780701181451 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 T his book exposes newspapers to the...

Jervoise Andreyev T HE S ECRET H ISTORY OF THE W AR ON C ANCER by Devra Davis Basic Books, £16.99, pp. 505, ISBN 9780465015665 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 T...

Justin Cartwright W EIMAR G ERMANY : P ROMISE AND T RAGEDY by Eric D. Weitz Princeton, £17.95, pp. 425, ISBN 9780691016955 ✆ £14.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 W eimar...

Jane Rye L UCIAN F REUD by William Feaver Rizzoli, £65, pp. 487, ISBN9780847829521 L ucian Freud describes his paintings as largely autobiographical, which seems to imply some...

Jonathan Keates T HE G REEKS AND G REEK L OVE by James Davidson Weidenfeld, £30, pp. 634, ISBN 97802978199 ✆ £24 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 H owever loaded or coded,...

Raymond Carr P ENULTIMATE A DVENTURES WITH B RITANNIA : P ERSONALITIES , P OLITICS AND C ULTURE IN B RITAIN by Wm. Roger Louis I.B. Tauris, £35, pp. 320, ISBN 9781845116934 B...

S. E. G. Hopkin T HE M ETATEMPORAL DETECTIVE by Michael Moorcock Prometheus Books, £17.99, pp. 327, ISBN 9781591025962 T he late Alan Coren once called a collection of...

Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked By various diseases of the intellect Or failing body. How am I still upright? And even I sleep half the day, cough half the...

James MacMillan explains why he hates the assumption that he is a liberal left-winger I n my travels I see myself frequently described in foreign media as a ‘leftwing and...

Andrew Lambirth A Decade of Discovery Estorick Collection, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, until 6 April T his year, as the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art...

Deborah Ross Cloverfield 15, Nationwide C loverfield is tiresome, dumb and horrid, and just in case you didn’t get that I’ll say it again: this film is tiresome, dumb and...

Lloyd Evans The President’s Holiday Hampstead The Sea Haymarket The Vertical Hour Royal Court T here’s no such thing as a great script idea. Ideas are equally good or bad,...

Marcus Berkmann W here do you find your music? Yes, I know, you go to the CD rack and there it is. Or, if you are as obsessed as some of us, you go into almost any room in the...

Michael Tanner Peter Grimes Opera North O f all Britten’s operas Peter Grimes is the one I have seen most often, and it remains not only the one that I find it hardest to...

Kate Chisholm ‘ P akistan is a dysfunctional state,’ said the writer Martin Amis in a debate about ideologies and ideologues in our post-9/11 world on Start the Week...

Simon Hoggart ‘S hut up and drink the Kool-Aid’ is an American slang phrase — tart, cynical and funny — used for telling people to get on with something they must do...

Taki Gstaad T he fat cats were all over Davos last week, greedy bankers, self-important bosses of publicly owned multinationals, craven hedge funders and shameless...

Jeremy Clarke T om proudly showed me a video clip on his mobile phone of his latest girlfriend doing a striptease. Confident girl. The tattoos must have cost a fortune. ‘So...

Melissa Kite D espite efforts not to be superstitious, I am much obsessed by the idea of disaster seepage. That is to say, when one thing goes wrong, a hundred others usually...

Richard Sennett I n the midst of an author tour for a new book, I am confronting both the worst evils of fast food and some surprising exceptions. Writers today cannot simply...

Gap-year students, try Italy, not Vietnam, says Charlotte Metcalf A wise friend once said that you only regret what you don’t do. Until I met John Hall and Nick Ross, I had...

Gibraltar has a colourful past, discovers John Torode B ritish as the Rock of Gibraltar.’ That was how an aged relative used to describe iconic objects — traditional London...

A s a father of three small children, I find myself constantly baffled by what is known in our household as ‘the boredom paradox’. Why is it that my four-year-old daughter...

A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb. Indeed I should love to blast away, if it would stay still in...

been spending too much time watching the last fortnight’s Australian Tennis Open from Melbourne — but unlike my colleague I found it an absolute revelation, with potentially...

My parents have agreed I can have 20 people to a party in our house in Balham. I am 16 but very responsible so they agreed to go out between 7 p.m. and 11 when the party is...

She comes three mornings a week and is very efficient. In the past, I was always on the school run for two of the three hours that she is in the house for, so we didn’t see...