The latest culture as recommended by our staff

A portrait of the artist as a tennis champion

Melissa Kite meets Martina Navratilova, nine times Wimbledon singles champion and now pioneer of ‘tennising’ — an artistic technique that creates Jackson Pollock-style patterns

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

James Forsyth talks to Scott McClellan, former press secretary to the President, about his new book attacking the Bush administration, its methods and its deceits

The Law Lords are right to resist the government

Lord Lloyd of Berwick says that the government’s emergency legislation to overturn their lordships’ ruling on witness anonymity is part of a ‘gradual usurpation’ of our liberties

I was starstuck by David Cameron

In the week of the Spectator Summer Party, Steven Berkoff recalls another of our celebrations at which he sought out the Tory leader and forgave his confusion of Brando and Dean

How to get stabbed: you, too, can be knifed in a public place

Rod Liddle says that it helps to be aged between 14 and 30, white and male. Being drunk and argumentative speeds things along. And no public policy seems to dissuade those who do the stabbing

Critical condition

Lloyd Evans on the perils of being both playwright and critic

It’s so unfair

Margaret Thatcher - the Long Walk to Finchley (BBC4) 

Parisian decadence

Marguerite (Haymarket), The Good Soul of Szechuan (Young Vic), Under Milk Wood (Tricycle)

Another Voice

I wish George Eliot or Alan Bennett had been with me in the Ryanair check-in queue

Welcome to the United States of Amnesia

Gore Vidal tells Mary Wakefield that America has forgotten its constitutional roots, and explains why Bobby Kennedy was ‘the biggest son of a bitch in politics’