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This week’s magazine – An Apology

An apology Yesterday the Spectator experienced production problems with this week’s issue. This has unfortunately resulted in some errors: namely that the last two words ‘Middle East’ are missing from the William Shawcross article and the Michael Gove article, as featured on the front cover, was not included. Please click on this link to view the

We are at war with hatred, fanaticism and despair

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French philosopher, points out that with Benazir Bhutto, they killed ‘a spectacularly visible woman’ who, whatever her flaws as a political leader, was astonishingly brave in fighting — uncovered, unveiled — for politics ‘and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists [the jihadists], floats over the human face of women’.

An act of evil that recalled the atrocities of the SS

Seldom can a New Year have dawned so bleakly as 2008 and rarely can a news story have spoken of evil so starkly as the New Year’s Day report from Kenya of children being deliberately burnt alive inside a church. The calculated, heartless wickedness of the act recalls one of the most notorious atrocities of

Musharraf may now be the last best hope of Pakistan

Forget Iran, forget North Korea, forget the emerging Chinese superpower and forget the resurgent nationalism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Even before Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, Pakistan was the country that arguably posed the greatest challenge to the West’s security. Now it is an even greater challenge. Pakistan is the first Muslim country to have acquired nuclear

Is a TV drama about the royal family sacrilege?

Filming on The Palace was only a few weeks in when the rumours started flying. ‘A tawdry and offensive affair’ trumpeted the Sunday Telegraph; ‘dreadful and offensive and very near to the bone’, added Lord St John of Fawsley; ‘a real danger [it will] undermine support for the [royal] family’, weighed in a media watchdog.