The wrong reset
The psychodrama in No. 10 is badly timed. The government has used emergency powers to ban meetings, church services and…
Wild life
Laikipia As the train pulled into Victoria my wife Claire, back home on the farm in Kenya, revealed that a…
War of words
How to win at Scrabble
Low life
At dawn, starving, I drove to a commercial laboratory in the town centre where five phials of blood were taken…
One country, one system
Beijing’s authority is sweeping through Hong Kong
Meaningful silences
Shirley Hazzard was in her late twenties when, in 1959, somewhat diffidently, she submitted her first short story to the…
Things fall apart
Civil war is breaking out in Ethiopia
Seriously overrated
Should the world be faster or slower? This is a question relevant to global economics, politics and culture. But not…
Respighi’s Roman Trilogy: Sinfonia of London/ John Wilson
Grade: A The strings rear up, there’s a flash of steel from the trumpets, and ten seconds into Respighi’s Feste…
Whiplash
Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…
Scot free
Staying in the Union is now riskier than independence
Great Scott
Ronnie’s: Ronnie Scott and His World-Famous Jazz Club was like the TV equivalent of an authorised biography: impressively thorough, often…
Princess of Whales
Inside the court of Carrie Symonds
Return to gender
Emilia is a period piece about Emilia Bassano who may have been the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The writer,…
Lounge pants
At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been…
Vital signs
Laura Gascoigne meets Margaret Calvert, the designer who dragged British signposting into the modern era
Dear Mary
Q. My son has moved his girlfriend into our fairly small house for the second lockdown. I am grateful for…
A bit previous
In Competition No. 3175 you were invited to submit a prequel to a well-known poem. C. Paul Evans’s opening to…
Farewell to four of the finest
So the Good Lord really wants to fill out his team: how else to interpret the passing in recent months…
Speed freaks
Writing in January, I described internet bullet chess, where the players have one minute for all their moves, as ‘popular,…
Gravestones
A parishioner in West Yorkshire has been allowed to put an inscription in Chinese on a relative’s gravestone. ‘There is…
High life
New York Who was it that first coined the expression ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady sings’? The great…
Letters
Still distant Sir: In James Forsyth’s analysis (‘Boris’s booster shot’, 14 November) he infers that a vaccine, if provided to…
Real life
The council has told me that what I saw was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When I described flames towering into the…
Barometer
Boris and the butcher’s dog Who first coined the phrase ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’? It has been traced…
