Features

We should be excited about signs of alien life

Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found tentative evidence for a ‘biosignature’ embedded in the light from a distant planet. Scientists and non-scientists around the world tried to interpret the results. Was this it? Was this the moment when humanity could finally

Middle-class parents are creating a new breed of brat

I recently reconnected with an old friend; I went to his house and met his children for the first time. One of them looked up from his screen as we entered the room, faintly curious about the intrusion. The other, with his back to us and his face obscured by a hoodie, didn’t bother. My

How Rome copes with the Conclave

Ordinary Romans, famous for their cheerful working-class familiarity, loved Pope Francis for his common touch. For the first time in living memory, they will have the opportunity of turning out on the streets to say their final farewells to a Pope, as Francis willed that he be buried in the papal basilica of Santa Maria

Conservatives all over the Anglosphere are paying the price for Trump

It is the great good fortune of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be united by a common language, and a misfortune of even greater magnitude that they share that language with the United States. America is a very different country to the four Commonwealth realms sometimes brigaded together under the ugly acronym ‘Canzuk’.

Damian Thompson

The extraordinary scale of the crisis facing the next pope

At 9.47 a.m. on Easter Monday we heard the words ‘con profondo dolore’ from a cardinal standing in the chapel of the Casa Santa Marta. Two hours earlier, Pope Francis ‘è tornato alla casa del Padre’ – ‘had returned to the house of the Father’. Most people won’t have noticed a curious detail: the cardinal

Melanie McDonagh

Pope Francis had his priorities right

After Pope Francis emerged from the Gemelli hospital in Rome last month, a reflection attributed to him a few years ago returned to circulation. It was on ‘hospital’. Some of it was the usual, about how it’s where like meets unlike (‘In intensive care you see a Jew taking care of a racist’ etc). Some

How I found Christianity

I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County Durham for marriage in south-west Scotland, she left the religion of her childhood behind. My Scottish father’s experience of church gave him an odd penchant for the electric organ, but that was about it. So

The world reveres British music

I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend of choral music under my direction, culminating in a concert in the grand Teatro. As they sang amid the chandeliers, gilded cherubs and plush velvet, I reflected that in all the recent discussion about tariffs,

Olivia Potts

Lamb is for life, not just for Easter

Roast lamb is as expected on the Easter table as turkey is at Christmas. But as a nation, we are falling out of love with lamb. Meat consumption in Britain is at its lowest level since records began, and according to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), lamb has been in particular decline for

The assisted suicide bill should not survive

Until about six months ago, it would have been hard to find a more inoffensive politician than the Labour backbencher Kim Leadbeater. A well-liked, upbeat, down-to-earth Yorkshirewoman, she entered politics because of a personal tragedy, the murder of her sister, the MP Jo Cox, in 2016. When asked on a Spectator podcast what was the

Would Trump really bomb Iran?

A satellite picture shows six American B-2 Stealth bombers parked on the runway at Diego Garcia. The planes – each with a distinctive flying-wing shape, like a bat – are sinister, otherworldly, and seem like a portent. Surely that’s the idea. Donald Trump has warned the Iranian leadership there ‘will be bombing the likes of

Bring back gory book covers!

Looking for a light, breezy read? If you happened to be browsing the bestseller bookshelves this summer your eye might be drawn to a cover that shows two colourful beach chairs under wafting palms on a bright, sandy shore. The shadows cast by the chairs become those of two children – maybe it’s a story

Ross Clark

Eco warriors are driving themselves to extinction

It wasn’t that long ago when the fashionable gathering place for young couples was a meeting of the National Childbirth Trust. I remember, in the early months of 1995, sitting in our instructor’s front room as she passed around a plastic model of a female pelvis while she asked us: ‘So how do you think