Spectator.co.uk

Beijing’s struggle for supremacy with India won’t be about land

Daniel Kahneman called it anchoring; I call it tunnel vision. It’s when we depend too heavily on our pre-existing ideas and first pieces of information – the anchor – to inform our judgments. How a problem is perceived, how it is described, how...

When the Intelligence and Security Committee’s (ISC) Russia Report was finally published last week, the name of one person who gave evidence will have leapt out for many people. Among the ‘external expert witnesses’ listed was none other than a...

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s late-Eighties to early-Nineties comedies have not gone down in history as great triumphs. Films like Junior and Twins – in which he played a pregnant man and Danny DeVito’s unidentical twin respectively – are movies only arch...

Until relatively recently I was under the impression that preventing people breaking the law was the primary job of a police officer. But is this always the case? Or is tackling crime sometimes substituted for a form of morality-based policing? The...

Given the way the Japanese fought, the president judged that if the war continued there would be many more casualties than those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

About 18 months ago, I attended a debate at Policy Exchange, the think tank founded by Nick Boles, Francis Maude and Archie Norman, on whether there was a free speech crisis at British universities. One panellist, Professor Jon Wilson of King’s...

As the covid-19 pandemic rages on, Pakistan is emerging as an unheralded, and unlikely, success story. Despite having the fifth highest population in the world, Pakistan’s cumulative covid-19 cases at 281,136, and 6,014 total deaths. rank the...

The new Hate Crime Bill will make criminals of us all

The real danger of the President’s outrageous behaviour is that we’ve ceased to expect anything different, says Masha Gessen

People often tell me I have a strange way of looking at the world. Obviously, it doesn’t seem strange to me. But I do tend to see the world backwards. For instance, most people think the principal obstacles to economic and technological growth are...

There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain: scaled up for today’s population, the equivalent of 42,000, while the UK’s (statistically flawed)...

The BBC documentary on Murdoch is pure one-sided bile, says the former Sun editor

I was homeless at 16, and sofa-surfed throughout my A-Levels. Despite my circumstances, I worked hard and now hold offers from some of the best universities in the country — Cardiff being my firm choice — to study law. Yet I’m terrified that because...

It's summer but the war on women continues. The latest person to fall victim to the transgender thought police is Labour MP Rosie Duffield after she liked a tweet by Piers Morgan where he harrumphed CNN’s reference to 'individuals with a cervix'....