Issue: February 2026
La bella figura
On Italian styling
Bippi Strangeways
Activist poet
Publishing skewered — in 1939
Anthony Powells’s pre-war novel is still the more reliable guide to the book business
Whisky a go-go
Whisky drinkers can benefi from industry turbul
A magnificent gift for Oxford
The Schwarzman Centre offers stately new facilities for all the university’s humanities departments
Bright shiny art
How the “masterpiece market” drives growth
The world’s most beloved oratorio
Hallelujah to that
The republican “we”
The fascinating history of the American experiment by a pair of prominent historians and brilliant storytellers
Killed, not “neutralised”
“neutralise”
Power and the Crown
Royal Law: Prerogative Foundations by Robert Craig
Most Read
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
Spectres of folk
Can the gallery embrace unofficial culture?
Angst, Nazis and forgotten treasure
Transcription / You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love / For the Love of Willie
Why nobody likes a smarty pants
Is it reasonable to conflate genuine intellectual endeavour with undue concern for supposed accuracy?
A show to make you afraid of the dark
Opera is the repository of everything crass and depraved in what is laughingly called European “civilisation”
Welcome to the low-trust economy
The multi-billion pound cost of Britain’s shoplifting surge
Worstall’s Corollary
Rare earths expose a fatal flaw at the heart of industrial strategy: governments intervene in systems they do not remotely understand
Can we get removals right?
Deporting illegal migrants is a lot more difficult than promising to deport them
Protecting what matters
The government’s new integration and extremism policy exposes a regime in denial
What the reparations debate says about Britain
Social and ideological shifts mean that we face an increasingly divided future
Jams, jellies and EU insanity
From toast to tungsten, the EU is an enemy of innovation
Calypso and carnage
A seismic Test series and a harbinger of a new force in Test cricket