Watch this space
In Competition No. 3261, you were invited to submit a poem about the James Webb Space Telescope. The first dazzling…
Liberté, égalité, nudité
France’s new sexual politics
Construction works
It’s time for some old-fashioned Tory state-building
India’s young stars
At the Chennai Olympiad, the Indian team began as second seeds, even with former World Champion Vishy Anand absent from…
Will the lights go off this winter?
Between 1992 and 2002, the UK experienced a period of benign economic growth. Known as the Nice (non-inflationary constant expansion)…
Grand tours and package holidays
In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to…
Barometer
Tracing paper FBI agents raided Donald Trump’s estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, in search of papers he is accused of removing…
The Battle for Britain: Michael Heath
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An exercise in futility
It’s possible that I owe Joe Biden some sort of an apology, however mealy-mouthed it might be. Last week I…
Food for thought
James Howells has spent years trying to persuade Newport council to allow him to spend millions digging up a rubbish…
Another pink gin please
At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the…
The (occasional) joy of being a QPR fan
I made my way to Loftus Road on Saturday for QPR’s first home fixture of the season. We’ve got a…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. My 74-year-old husband was having drinks in the garden of some young clients when he bit down on an…
Children have a lot to learn
Could our long journey to adulthood actually be the key to our success, wonders Sam Leith
Men under fire
On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all…
What a drag
Why are protestors so angry about a children’s story hour?
The essence of bohemian Paris
This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and…
How to build a monastery
I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of…
Down to the sea again
In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of…
Revolt in paradise
Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should…
Between history and fable
Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about…
Brave men in small boats
‘I found this story by accident,’ begins Julia Jones’s Uncommon Courage, referring to documents belonging to her late father that…
Hiding in plain sight
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
Going bananas
America is fast regressing
Thinker and gadfly
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason…
