Features Archives

Friday

May 15, 2026

The Romans would tax anything

When Nero committed suicide in AD 68, he left Rome deep in debt after military campaigns, building himself a fabulous “Golden House,” and the great fire of Rome (AD 64). His successor Vespasian, who fought his way to power in late AD 69, set to work at once. A hardworking man of humble origins and simple tastes, Vespasian was well suited to the task: “He got up early, even when it was still dark, and read the letters and the official breviaria” (“reports”; Latin brevis, “brief”). He sold off some imperial estates and nearly doubled provincial taxes, while extending Roman citizenship.

Thursday

May 14, 2026

Cressida Bonas

How to write a diary

A few gray hairs have appeared on our dog Budgie’s chin. She’s only seven and is part of our family. The silver streaks are a reminder that we are inching slowly to the inevitable day when she will no longer be with us. “Having dogs is a sad business,” my dad says. “You fall in love with them and when they go, they break your heart.” I once heard Ricky Gervais describe dogs as life’s greatest invention, the closest thing to something spiritual most of us will ever experience. As a joke, my husband asked me whether Budgie was my best friend. “Yes,” I replied, and I wasn’t joking at all. I write a diary and I try to think of something to say every day. Occasionally I stop myself: “You can’t write that,” I think. “What if someone reads it?

Lionel Shriver

Let’s ditch the idea of the ‘black vote’

I long took for granted that US opinion polls break down respondents into white people, black people and Hispanics. But I’ve come to look askance at this convention. Reporting on political views by race now seems perverse. It implies that a citizen’s primary identity is grounded in skin color, and it reifies a way of thinking about the American people that is regressive, divisive, inaccurate and downright un-American. I was reminded of this recent point of annoyance when the Supreme Court struck down a Louisiana congressional map that none too subtly contrived to create an additional majority-black district. (The district in question drizzled and blobbed diagonally from one northern corner of the state to the far southern one like a trail of ink on blotting paper.

The Spectator

Which animals are older than David Attenborough?

Travel sickness Three people were reported to have died in an outbreak of hantavirus on a cruise ship returning to Europe from Antarctica. How likely are you to fall ill with an infectious disease on a cruise? A European study that analyzed US data on 760 cruises between 2010 and 2013 found an overall illness rate of 2.81 cases per 10,000 traveler-days, while 97% of cases involved norovirus. The rate of outbreaks was highest on ships which had a home port in Cuba or Egypt and lowest on ships with a home port in France, Greece, Italy or the UK. Local difficulties Does a governing party ever do well in local elections?

Douglas Murray

Things can always get worse

I have spent the past week marveling at the behavior of our commentating class. They seem to have whipped themselves back into that familiar frenzy which must lead, inexorably, to the Prime Minister stepping down. “He has to go”; “The most incompetent prime minister of my lifetime”; “Things can’t go on like this” – these were the general sentiments revolving around Keir Starmer even before his party’s thumping in the May 7 local elections. The problem is that some of us have a longish memory. So when people say the Starmer government is uniquely incompetent or ineffectual, a tiny flare goes off in my mind. Have these people forgotten Theresa May?

Rod Liddle

The unstoppable rise of stupidity

Hold the front page: I’ve found a very good contemporary novel to occupy my time. Such things have become vanishingly rare, even if one is grateful for David Mitchell’s metafiction, the occasional blast from Michel Houllebecq and Ben Marcus’s engaging lunacy. By and large, modern novels lack depth, originality of form and language, political unorthodoxy (i.e. freethinking) and a vaulting fictional imagination. Where, today, would you find the J.G. Ballards, the David Storeys, the Anthony Burgesses? In the sensitivity reader’s rejected pile, I suspect.

Charles Moore

Keir Starmer is downplaying the Islamist threat to Jews

At the anti-Semitism “summit” in Downing Street, Sir Keir Starmer achieved a personal first. He used the word “Islamists.” But in order to utter a word he had previously avoided in relation to the subject, Sir Keir had to approach it crabwise. Instead of identifying Islamists as the main ideological and physical threat to British Jews, he said: “We’re clear-eyed about the fact that anti-Semitism does not have one source alone: Islamists, far-left, far-right extremism, all target Jewish communities.” Islamists were thus inserted into the conversation but also downplayed. It is obsolete not to recognize that the far right in Britain – for the moment at least – more or less leaves Jews alone.

James Heale

Nigel Farage’s plan to win over the left

The loudest man in politics knows when to keep his silence. Nigel Farage held his tongue as Keir Starmer’s premiership floundered. Aside from a few PFLs – proper f***ing lunches – to celebrate the local election results, the Reform UK leader was already looking to the next challenge. Like a shark, Farage keeps moving forward, into new waters, hungry for more. One ally sums up his approach to politics in a single word: “Momentum.” For the past few months, Farage has had one goal: destroying the Tories. The figure “1,453” was the total of gains proudly pumped out on Reform’s Instagram. For Farage, May 7 was the political equivalent of the fall of Constantinople – the point when the Conservatives ceased to be a national party.

Tuesday

May 5, 2026

Rod Liddle

Voters get the politicians they deserve – so Britain should get ready for PM Polanski

It is a truism that in a democracy the voters get the government they deserve – and so we should probably not complain too much if our next prime minister is a snaggle-toothed halfwit who presents to voters an infantile diorama drawn from fairy tales in which dancing is more important than manufacturing, people can be whatever they want to be, the military should be abolished and everyone will be happy except for the Jews, who are to be hounded and vilified and attacked. Zack Polanski’s Greens are the embodiment of what the American writer Rob K. Henderson called “luxury beliefs,” which are beliefs in the main based upon fictions – and they are soaring in the polls.

John Fund

It’s the corruption, stupid!

There’s been a change of mood across the country – and not one that is favorable to the GOP. Last November, the prediction markets gave Republicans a 70 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate. Now their odds have deteriorated. It looks likely that the Democrats will win both the chambers – so what’s happened? The latest polls all tell the same story. The economy is no longer Trump’s superpower. Of those polled by Fox News, three- quarters rate the economy negatively, with 70 percent feeling it’s getting worse. Voters now trust Democrats on the economy more than Republicans for the first time since May 2010. Trump’s weakness on the economy brings with it another growing danger for him.

Sunday

May 3, 2026

Ben Clerkin

Inside the Killhouse: where Ukraine’s revolutionary military robots are developed

The Ukrainian unmanned ground vehicle rolled up to a small bunker hidden in a thicket in Kharkiv oblast then stopped. Another remote-controlled vehicle had just detonated its 66lbs of explosives at the Russian bunker’s entrance, which was still smoldering. And before that a kamikaze drone had dived inside and exploded. The operator was about to detonate his explosives when two Russian soldiers pushed a sign through the bunker’s shattered roof saying they were surrendering. They were directed to Ukrainian lines by a drone and taken into custody as POWs. So ended the world’s first fully robotic assault on an enemy position. The remotely operated vehicle in this attack is called a Targan (“cockroach” in Ukrainian) and looks like a miniature flatbed without the cab.

Friday

May 1, 2026

Andrew Gilligan

March of the Greenshirts: Polanski’s party are Britain’s real racists

“Back us to stop the far right,” say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far right? Saiqa Ali, a Green candidate in next week’s elections for Streatham St. Leonard’s, Lambeth, posts on her Instagram account a picture of the Earth suffocated by a giant serpent with the Star of David on its skin. She thinks that the British government includes too many “Zionists Jews,” and that Donald Trump is “owned by Jews.” Not even the Z-word, that last one. Not even Israel. Just… Jews. Ali also posts a picture of an armed man in what looks like a Hamas headband, captioning it: “Long live the Resistance.” If it is a Hamas headband, this may actually be a criminal offense.

Mary Wakefield

Shameless Britain: we are a nation of shoplifters

It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked just for doing his job – for stopping a thief nicking booze – and national outrage over the whole affair is still running high. Sean is on morning TV as I write, donations to pay for his appeal rising steadily. In part, the fuss is a measure of sympathy. Sean worked at Morrisons for 29 years and was liked by the people of Aldridge. He was sacked, say Morrisons, because they have a “deter, don’t detain” policy – though what Morrisons think could possibly have deterred this thief, given his long list of previous convictions, is anyone’s guess. But the feeling for Sean isn’t just a swell of support for one man; it’s also a symptom of wider frustration.

Charles Moore

Olly Robbins’s next move

This session of parliament is due to end between April 29 and May 6. Now the government is desperate for an Order in Council to kill it off by 9 a.m. on the 29th to avoid another painful Prime Minister’s Questions. The parliament that reassembles for the King’s Speech on May 13 could hardly, in theory, look more like what Sir Keir Starmer wants. His party has the largest overall majority since 2001. He will have jettisoned all hereditary peers.

Tim Shipman

Is Britain ready for Chancellor Ed Miliband?

When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Peter Mandelson affair, a senior Labour figure remarked: “What really did we learn from all this? That Keir made a bad decision, wants someone else to blame and didn’t really know what was going on in his own government. Fancy that!” The fact that 14 Labour MPs voted to refer the Prime Minister to the Privileges Committee (the body which forced Boris Johnson from the political stage) – and a total of 53 recorded no vote in his defense – is far from a ringing endorsement of his leadership. But the significance of the Mandelson hearings has been misunderstood.

Max Jeffery

The new age of transgender rage

It’s a year since the UK’s Supreme Court ruled that gender means biological sex – and not much has changed. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which is advising the government on how to apply the judgment to law, has spent a long while drafting guidance. But last week, word arrived that Bridget Phillipson, the women and equalities minister, wants the EHRC to “tone down” its advice, leading to further delays. Why the holdup? My guess is that it has something to do with a new era we are entering. An era of “TRANS RAGE.” That’s not my expression. It’s from Bash Back, a recently formed anonymous collective going after people and organizations it believes frustrate the transgender experience.

Thomas Steventon

My miracle match against the Vatican’s cricket team

Many have come to Rome seeking spiritual guidance: Thomas à Becket, Lord Byron, Lionel Richie. I came for a different purpose: to defend a papal cricket trophy. I am not Catholic. And, until last year, I had never played cricket before. It all started, as many great British stories do, with a pub: the Three Stags in Kennington. My friend Tom had invited me to what he described as a “Cricket Club Party.” As I headed upstairs, the barman’s quizzical look when I mentioned I was there for “the party” should have given me cause for concern. As I came in through the doors, I was greeted by what appeared to be the end of a Sunday lunch and a collection of six individuals for whom the collective age would have been a record-setting Test score.

Natalie Livingstone

The unlikely link between Nuremberg and The Devil Wears Prada

In the aftermath of Péter Magyar’s victory in Hungary, while I watch people dancing in the streets as they celebrate Viktor Orbán’s dramatic ousting, I think of my Hungarian grandparents. As Holocaust survivors, they were the lucky ones, and they remained proud Hungarians to the end. They would have greeted this election with characteristic realism: Minden csoda három napig tart, as the saying goes. Every miracle lasts three days. Hungary is a country still feeling the long aftershocks of World War Two and the Holocaust. Those shocks seem clearer than ever after the years I have spent researching The Nuremberg Women, my new book on the trials.

Lionel Shriver

‘Tea-towel-gate’: another British travesty

During last September’s freshers’ fair at Royal Holloway, University of London, two students got into a brief verbal tiff that became subject to the administration’s immediate alarm. Our characters: Brodie Mitchell, a self-described non-Jewish Zionist, and Huda El-Jamal, the female president of the Friends of Palestine Society, who is of Palestinian descent. Mitchell says El-Jamal taunted him – “Here’s the wannabe Jew” – and questioned why he wasn’t wearing a yarmulke. Referring to the keffiyeh El-Jamal was wearing as a headscarf, Mitchell taunted back: “You’re wearing a tea towel over your head.” A monstrous exchange, we can all agree. Naturally, Royal Holloway suspended Mitchell for nine weeks – nine weeks!

Geoffrey Cain

Why Apple’s new CEO will play it safe

When Apple named its next chief executive last month it did so without ceremony. Tim Cook will become executive chairman on September 1; John Ternus, his senior vice-president of hardware engineering, will succeed him as CEO. The announcement came with a photograph, not a keynote: the two men walking through Apple Park, the circular glass campus in Cupertino that Steve Jobs designed with the British architect Norman Foster and did not live to see completed. It was the first Apple succession of the post-masterpiece age, and the prose matched. Apple said the transition had been approved unanimously by its board after a “thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.” Cook had spent 15 years building a company that could change its CEO without spectacle.