Hitting the high seas
The Barbican’s big summer show is billed on the website as ‘the sold-out musical sensation, Anything Goes’. The term ‘sold-out’…
Beard oil
Every few months I take out a box of essential oils and carefully lay them out on my kitchen table,…
Bridge
In the modern game, being green versus red (non-vul v. vul) is a licence to bid on tram tickets: passing…
A lucky escape
I chatted to a spectator after one of my games at the Sparkassen Chess Trophy in Dortmund. ‘A close shave…
The problem of consciousness
Given the ingenuity of machine-makers, said Descartes in the 17th century, machines might well be constructed that exactly resemble humans.…
Network failure
Why must my mobile provider harass me all through my holiday?
The thinking dragon
Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…
Planet Liz
What foreign policy would look like under a PM Truss
Putin’s grand illusions
Sanctions are working — whatever Russia says
Did the earth move for you?
I’m writing this on the plane back from Iceland, a fact that fills me with relief. Not because I didn’t…
The tiger who came for me
What we can learn from Jim Corbett’s big-cat tales
The beauty of ‘theft-tanks’
The Conservative party leadership contest is a milestone for diversity and inclusion. This time, we get to choose between someone…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. My parents are abroad for two months and as my flatmates in London are all, like me, working from…
Biden’s victories look a lot like defeats
Joe Biden’s week did not get off to a good start. When running for office in 2020 he repeatedly boasted…
The perfect summer drink
Imagine a camel train, crossing the great desert. The remaining water is rancid; the beasts’ humps are shrunken. Death looms.…
The future is brown
Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…
Catcalls
‘A law against catcalls?’ asked my husband sceptically. ‘What next, criminalising booing and hissing?’ He often gets the wrong end…
Battle for Britain
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Chronicle of a death foretold
In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…
In deep water
Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle.…
Rooting for Rishi
How Sunak wowed the Tories of West Suffolk
More Russian escapism
Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…
Journey to selfhood
Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…
Making scientific history
In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…
An autumn of discontent
One influential figure on the centre-left told me recently that he isn’t bothered about who wins the Tory leadership contest.…
