Rarely has there been such a triumph of expectation management as the arrival in No. 10 of the new Prime Minister. Only eight weeks ago, Labour was agonising over the loss of...

TONY PARSONS Hong Kong They have moved the Star Ferry. How could they move the Star Ferry? The view of the harbour from my room at the Ritz-Carlton should be one of the great...

CHARLES MOORE Han-let Harman seems to have won the deputy leadership of the Labour party by saying she did not want people to spend £10,000 on a handbag when other people were...

By Tamzin Lightwater MONDAY Horrid, horrid. It's all election war footing and aggression and shouting round here. Jed has decided we are 'too nice'. Says he is going to toughen...

Fraser Nelson says that the new Prime Minister has positioned himself in territory that the Tories have left vacant, and is ready to fight a cultural battle to defend the...

Ten years on, David Tang recalls his conversation with Margaret Thatcher, his secret meetings with John Major, and the scant thanks Britain has received for its historical role...

As editor of the Sunday Times, Andrew Neil drew attention to the emergence of the underclass. Now, he writes, a generation of feral youth has emerged trapped in welfare...

James Purnell, one of the government's rising stars, tells Fraser Nelson that the new Prime Minister will do more than Cameron to help people fulfil their potential AJob Centre...

Martyn Gregory, the most authoritative investigator of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, reports from a daily legal circus dominated by Mohamed Fayed astard'! hissed...

The poet Hugo Williams, in an entertaining ramble around changes in language in the TLS the other day, noted that curate's egg is now widely used to mean 'a mixed blessing',...

Chinua Achebe, the grandfather of African literature, talks to Clemency Burton-Hill about writing in English, his native Nigeria — and the role this magazine played in his story...

At my time of life, and in my circumstances, I ought to be calm and unruffled. I should be like a saddhu in a Himalayan cave, whose pulse rate no merely external event in the...

Sir: Last week Melanie Phillips attacked the West's approach to the Palestinians as deluded (Gaza: another front in Iran's war', 23 June). But if her analysis carried sway it...

Sir: Further to M.R.D Foot's review (Books, 23 June), I should like to add a note about Joan Astley, now in her 97th year and as delightful as ever. I had the good fortune to...

Sir: As one who signed the candidates' book for Andrei Navrozov, might I apologise to Brooks's members for having done so? His views on the smoking ban are immaterial, just as...

Sir: I have been very interested in the recent correspondence about robins (Letters, 16 June). Many years ago, my mother was befriended by a robin which constantly followed her...

Sir: Michael Henderson is wrong to call for the removal of the skateboarders from the South Bank (Arts, 9 June). The skateboarders complement the life and general hustle and...

Sir: Charles Moore is right to point out that the world's media have been 'greedily clamouring' for a guilty verdict in the case of Conrad Black (The Spectator's Notes, 16...

HUGO RIFKIND There are things which fashion can teach us. Real things. Not just things about puce after a heavy lunch, or the invariable inadvisability of headwear. Things about...

PAUL JOHNSON Funny creatures have begun to appear in Somerset. Little herds of vicuna, llamas and guanaco, and other similar animals. They are farmed for various purposes,...

Matthew Lynn says EMI is a giant of the music business and a symbol of British prowess in 'creative industries' — but has stumbled from disaster to disaster in recent years A...

Ross Clark There aren't many people who can say that Gordon Brown has cut their taxes. In fact, as far as I'm aware there are just managers of private equity funds — and me....

Richard Northedge meets Kurdish-born Nadhim Zahawi, boss of the internet-based polling company YouGov The company Gordon Brown will be watching most closely as Prime Minister is...

MARTIN VANDER WEYER The £6 billion merger of Saga and the AA is a gift for cartoonists: a company whose ideal customer is Victor Meldrew with a broken fan-belt on the hard...

Tim Congdon J. K. GALBRAITH by Richard Parker Old Street Publishing, 14 Bowling Green Lane, London EC1R OBD, Tel: 020 7253 3360, £25, pp. 820, ISBN 9781905847099 £20 (plus £2.45...

Hugh Massingberd How WE BUILT BRITAIN by David Dimbleby Bloomsbury, £20, pp. 288, ISBN 9780747588719 £16 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Ihave a hazy memory of a 1950s television...

Ben Wilson THE CONDOR'S HEAD: AN AMERICAN ROMANCE by Ferdinand Mount Chatto, £17.99, pp. 326, ISBN 9780701181208 © £1439 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 We are promised a true...

Jonathan Sumption A HISTORY OF MODERN BRITAIN by Andrew Marr Pan Macmillan, £25, pp. 629, ISBN 9781405005388 © £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The problem about contemporary...

Simon Baker WHAT IS THE WHAT by Dave Eggers Hamish Hamilton, £18.99, pp. 475, ISBN 9780241142578 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 what is the What cuts through the strata...

Anthony Sattin BLOOD RIVER: A JOURNEY TO AFRICA'S BROKEN HEART by Tim Butcher Chatto, £12.99, pp. 363, ISBN 9780701179816 © £1039 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 f all the...

Sarah Standing THE DIANA CHRONICLES by Tina Brown Century, £18.99, pp. 481, ISBN 9781846052866 £15.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 princess Diana was two years my junior and...

Non-fiction: Words and Deedes: Selected Journalism 1931-2006 by W. E Deedes (Pan, £9.99) Crete by Barry Unsworth (National Geographic Directions, £6.99) John Osborne: A Patriot...

Ray Monk EINSTEIN: HIS LIFE AND UNIVERSE by Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster, £25, pp. 675, ISBN 9781847370488 £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 EINSTEIN ON POLITICS: HIS...

Alistair Duncan talks to Kristin Scott Thomas about juggling her family with theatre and film Kristin Scott Thomas has a bee in her bonnet. Actually, she has several bees in her...

Andrew Lambirth Artists' Self-Portraits from the Uffizi: Masterpieces from Velazquez to Chagall Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 15 July phe Uffizi is to Florence what the...

Angela Summerfield Ruskin Revisited: George Rowlett at Chamonix and Coniston Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter's Street, London Ni, until 21July; The Ruskin Libraiy, Lancaster...

Robin Holloway Scripts like sheep, marks dancing out of the ears; but amidst the academic year's most frazzling fortnight there have been five successive events in Cambridge of...

Damian Elwes was born in London in 1960 and is the son and grandson of portrait painters (Dominic and Simon Elwes). At Scream, 34 Bruton Street, London Wl, is Artists' Studios,...

Michael Tanner Katya Kabanova Royal Opera House La Clemenza di Tito Coliseum lmost everything about Katya Kabanova, Janacek's first almost perfect opera, is extraordinary,...

There's something magical about seeing museum-quality pictures in a private, infor- mal space, perhaps the nearest many of us come to having them in our own homes. In Landscape...

Lloyd Evans The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder Cottesloe Pera Pales Arcola Lord of the Rings Dnuy Lane Ath. The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder I ad to suspend my disbelief so hard...

Deborah Ross Shrek the Third U, Nationwide h, for heaven's sake, now they've gone and ruined Shrek, and I hate them for it. Indeed, may those responsible be damned to the...

James Delingpole Doctor Who (BBC1, Saturday) has been particularly brilliant of late and I think Spectator readers should know. There were moments in the first two new series...

Kate Chisholm phe last thing Winston Churchill (or Ramsay MacDonald, for that matter) would have thought of discussing before taking power as prime minister was the kind of...

Taki When a lame-duck draft dodger pardoned a major crook and fugitive — along with his very own drug-dealing halfbrother — American public opinion was righteously outraged. It...

Jeremy Clarke e most contentious aspect of our relationship was my habit, in her words, of using her flat like a hotel. I'd turn up unexpectedly, she says, kick the cat, break...

Nick Foulkes seeks summer watches that fulfil his alter-ego ambitions 1 am always ready to be mentored by older, wiser men, and on the important subject of the holiday watch my...

Tom Williams visits underexploited Alsace 'A lsace? That's a bit far away, isn't it?' That's what everyone said when I told them I was planning to spend a romantic weekend there...

Stuart Reid on the joy of renting an apartment in Rome ook at this,' I said. "Key management". What's that all about?' My wife winced. 'I suppose it's about key management,' she...

Lucinda Baring There's nothing like a free holiday. Thanks to a banking 'cash-rich, timepoor' brother, a girlfriend and I jumped on a plane and headed to his empty finca in the...

Freddy Gray Adecent beach should not be too decent. An overload of litter is of course disgusting, but a light scattering — a crisp packet here, a Fanta can there — pleasingly...

Tanya Gold 'Can anyone name Tony Soprano's horse?' says Marc Baron, our tour guide, standing in the aisle of a leaking coach at the start of The Sopranos Bus Tour of New Jersey....

Dear Maly Q. My wife and I have just given a summer party to which we invited around 200 people. Correction — we posted invitations to 200, 20 of whom rang up on the day to say...

FRANK KEATING How went our 'Last Smoke' dinner on Thursday, hosted by the Spec's Andrew Neil at London's swish Four Seasons Hotel? If not so grand, there were doubtless other...