The Week

Leading article

Hot air summit

The delegates who will gather for the star-studded Paris climate summit include celebrities, presidents and perhaps even the Pope. Among other things, they will be asked to consider the formation of an ‘International Tribunal of Climate Justice’, which developed countries would be hauled before for breaching agreed limits on greenhouse gas emissions. That the proposed

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week | 5 November 2015

Home The all-party Foreign Affairs Committee urged David Cameron, the Prime Minister, not to press ahead with a Commons vote on British air strikes against Islamic State positions in Syria. At its conference, Scottish Labour adopted a policy of opposition to Trident renewal, though Kezia Dugdale, its leader, remained in favour, while the Labour party

Diary

Diary – 5 November 2015

I had only experienced great loss when my mother died. It was desperately harrowing, but not as harrowing as the news that my sister Jackie had passed away. My mother had suffered a long lingering illness but Jackie only told me about her cancer two weeks before she died. It was a shattering, heart-breaking blow

Ancient and modern

How ancient Athens handled immigrants

Among all the arguments about how many non-EU immigrants we should let in, campaigners are proposing a scheme for private sponsorship of Syrian asylum seekers. The idea of sponsorship for immigrants goes back to Athens in the 5th century bc. Metoikos (literally ‘household-changer’), our ‘metic’, was the category into which any non-Athenian wanting residence in

Barometer

Barometer | 5 November 2015

Family business Justin Trudeau, son of Pierre Trudeau, was elected to his father’s old job as Prime Minister of Canada. Other descendants of former leaders currently in power: — The maternal grandfather of Shinzo Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, held the same job between 1957 and 1960. — Park Geun-hye, president of South Korea, is

From the archives

The fall of a king

From ‘News of the week’, The Spectator, 6 November 1915: We greatly regret to record a serious accident to the King. When His Majesty was reviewing troops of the First Army on the Western front the cheers of the men startled the mare he was riding. She reared up so far that, she fell and partly

Letters

Letters | 5 November 2015

The power of creativity Sir: A rounded education should encourage creativity as well as maths, English, science and history if Britain is to compete in the modern world. Toby Young’s claim that the arts world is exaggerating the decline of arts in secondary schools therefore deserves to be challenged (Status anxiety, 24 October). In spite