Anne Applebaum says the catastrophic plane crash near Smolensk, which killed so many of Poland’s leading figures, may hasten a rapprochement between Warsaw and Moscow The President, the First Lady, the chairman of the National Bank. Fifteen members of parliament. Ten generals. Anna Walentynowicz, 80-year-old heroine of the Solidarity strike of 1980. Ryszard Kaczorowski, the
Gordon Brown’s latest campaign slogan — ‘Vote Labour or Die of Cancer’ — has a certain apocalyptic vigour about it, don’t you think, even if it was implied rather than directly stated? The party sent out 250,000 ‘postcards’ to women, although they were not the sort of postcards you get when your Aunt Jemima’s been
Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future Tory government under David Cameron. Last week’s Spectator debate — ‘Britain’s in decline again. Pity Cameron is a Heath not a Thatcher’ — looked at the nature of a future
Benedict XVI’s handling of sex abuse cases is not above criticism, says John L. Allen Jr. But the campaign for him to be hauled before an international court is ill informed A Vatican spokesperson recently laughed off the campaign to issue an arrest warrant for Pope Benedict XVI when he visits the United Kingdom in
The fate of Lady Mary Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s prisoner and a potential heir to the throne, has never been resolved. Now Leanda de Lisle tells all At the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, scribbles on the walls of the 12-foot prison room bear testimony to the dreary misery of the woman Elizabeth I had
For my 19-month-old son Santo, living in Rome meant that a typical morning went something like this: get up, get dressed, get hoisted up and down by a hydraulic car lift in our local garage (the mechanic Paolo was one of his good friends), stop for a sugary cornetto for breakfast, help the barman make
For many Tory voters, a change of government on 6 May will not be enough. What Britain needs, they think, is little less than a revolution — against skyscraping taxes and personal debt, a corrupt parliament, and a surveillance state that is stripping away liberties as old as Magna Carta. In short, Britain needs what
Freddy Gray meets Jane Goodall, the primatologist whose ‘unprofessional’, empathetic approach led to astonishing discoveries about how human-like chimpanzees really are A 76-year-old woman is making chimpanzee noises at me. ‘OOOHHH HAAAAA, OOOHHH HAAAA,’ she shouts. ‘And then there’s a WRAAAAH! That’s a threat! WRAAAH!’ This woman isn’t mad, though. She is Jane Goodall, the
It seems mandatory at the moment to refer to all cases of child abuse as ‘child rape’. Well — I wasn’t raped but I was, as the euphemism goes, ‘interfered with’ by a representative of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. And rather than seek out those who were sexually abused by priests, nuns and
Alien life-forms have been cutting holes in sheep in Shropshire with highly powered lasers and strange glowing balls of light. According to a local farmer, reported by an oddly credulous chap from the Daily Telegraph, there is a ‘corridor’ of 50 miles stretching from Shrewsbury towards the Powys border where UFOs arrive quite regularly and
The Roman Catholic Church is a constant source of controversy, as the ongoing outrage over clerical sexual abuse shows. But the Church also inspires great devotion and loyalty. The Spectator recently hosted a debate under the title ‘England Should be a Catholic Country Again’. Here, we reprise two passionate arguments for and against the motion.
For anyone trying to follow the journey begun by Abraham, conversion to Islam should recommend itself with compulsive force. It’s the most plausible of the three religions that look back to him. Near the root of Judaism is the conviction that a single people are chosen by God — a people, moreover, who are hard
There was total silence, apart from birdsong, when we entered the village of Kuru Karama. Every building had been burnt or destroyed. There were no villagers in sight, just two or three soldiers at a guard post dozing in the late afternoon sun. At length we found a group of young men and women. Did
A few Saturdays ago a stocky 32-year-old went to mass at the quaintly named Gaylord Texan Convention Center in Dallas, Texas. Later that day he had an altercation with a 34-year-old Ghanaian. Records show that he threw over 1,000 punches at the older man during a half-hour scuffle. Countless bystanders witnessed the brawl but not
Objections are raised to a cracking new children’s book on account of a dead German soldier and pictures of frostbite. But the young adore grisly bits, says Robert Gore-Langton There’s a cracking new children’s book out, Mission Telemark, by the award-winning writer Amanda Mitchison. It is set in the second world war and it’s based
Rod Liddle fears he may be doomed — although the modern Church of Englandis reluctant to admit that anyone at all suffers eternal damnation Not so long ago, when I was making a film about some aspect of Christianity for Channel 4, I asked a Church of England bishop about the concept of heaven, what
Bloody civil war lies in store for the Labour party if it loses the election, says James Forsyth. Brown’s henchmen are hoping to keep power, with Ed Balls as the next leader. The Blairite resolve to play nice will be tested The public gallery of the House of Commons was unusually full on Monday afternoon.
American healthcare makes our system look good, writes Ross Clark. But however revolutionary Barack Obama’s health reforms are, Americans will still pay through the nose Had I a more devotional attachment to free-market economics I suppose I would be joining all those Republicans condemning Barack Obama’s health reforms. I have written enough about the failings
At first he was coy. ‘Yes my brother,’ Salim the dealer smirked. ‘How many kilos you want?’ It had taken us only a day to find a man in Tanzania who would sell us ivory tusks from poached elephants. We met Salim in a Dar es Salaam hamburger joint and the whole exchange was ridiculously
If the Conservative party were your refrigerator, all your food would go bad. If it were your car or bicycle, you would be stranded by the side of the road. If it were your accountant, you would be bankrupt. If it were your lawyer, you would be in prison. No commercial organisation or product so