The United Kingdom faces two defence challenges. The first is financial. After decades of underinvestment, rebuilding military capability is essential. But the second challenge is intellectual.

There’s an idea kicking around that “woke” is killing culture. According to elder statesmen of the arts, from John Cleese to Sean Penn, do-gooders and virtue-signallers are suffocating the life out of ...

Let no one accuse the Spectator of letting the death of its longstanding columnist Rod Liddle, who died aged 66 on 2nd August, go unremarked. After decking out its homepage in black, the grand old ...

The narrator of Ted Chiang’s short story “The Great Silence” is a parrot at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. The bird watches as humans desperately seek life in other solar systems using a huge ...

How the UK Supreme Court decided a fundamental rights case without using human rights law ...

Big Tech has quantified, monetised and exploited our attention. Can we dare to rebel and engage with the world in different ways?

In the 1997 Australian comedy The Castle, an underprepared lawyer attempts to argue that the forced sale of his client’s house is in breach of the Constitution. The judge asks, “What section of the ...

Its owners do, however, have one problem. “That overflow pipe,” said Dawn Farnworth, who established By the Wye with her husband, Steve, five years ago. “It never just trickles out, it gushes out.

From nurseries to nursing homes, private equity increasingly affects all of us. This week, Ellen and Alona are joined by journalist Hettie O’Brien, who investigates the rise of private equity in her ...

Last summer I was invited to take part in two small private events attended by many US, European and Asian billionaires, some worth many tens of billions. The events were fun and stimulating, and many ...

When Donald Trump took the oath of office for the second time in January 2025, he was surrounded not just by politicians and dignitaries, but by the CEOs of six of the world’s most visible technology ...

Twelfth November was an unremarkable day in British politics. Another day when the topic of debate wasn’t one of voters’ main concerns—immigration or healthcare, say, or the budget, or the farmers—but ...