Rest in peace, Wilbur Smith
A sparrow falls. The death of Wilbur Smith at the weekend deprives the world of one of the great luminaries…
The Bitcoin delusion
Cast your mind back a few years to last week – when there was much laughing and wailing at the…
Why did we decide that Covid was over?
Look, I don’t know much epidemiology. Can’t pretend to. So what follows is, necessarily, a personal finger to the wind.…
No, the term ‘white privilege’ is not extremist
A Tory MP last week raised the delightful possibility that the big family of what we might call the terrorism…
Is anti-Etonian prejudice really OK?
Don’t you wish Angela Rayner would come off the fence, just once in a while, and tell us what she…
Keir Starmer’s essay is a cliché-ridden disaster
Many years ago, a tabloid newspaper played an unkind prank on the author of a very long and much talked-about…
World gone lazy
‘Where’s the car?’ said my wife Alice, interrupting my Zoom meeting on Saturday morning. ‘It’s where you left it,’ I…
How to kill the English language
Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a ‘fronted adverbial’ is. I used one in the…
Doc Martens
Doc Martens are one of those quintessentially British things that, like the royal family and lorries queuing on the M20,…
‘People confuse sadness with darkness’
An interview with the American novelist Mary Gaitskill
Graphic reportage
One of the running jokes about ‘serious’ graphic novels is that so many seem to consist, one way and another,…
Goodbye to all that
On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table, my family and I, and had a takeaway from the Turkish…
A study in realpolitik
Barack Obama was famous for his rhetoric, but his achievements show just what a steely political operator he was too, says Sam Leith
Liberty or death?
Well thank goodness for that, eh? Just as we reached our darkest hour and resigned ourselves to an endless series…
The Hay festival’s uneasy dance with the UAE
The Hay Festival, memorably described by Bill Clinton as ‘the Woodstock of the mind’, has, over the past couple of…
A cat for Kit
Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando,…
In defence of wokeness
We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favour of…
Oxford circus
If you’re looking for a sign of the academic times, you could do worse than consider the image, published in…
She was just a damn cat – and I loved her
I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep…
How do you enforce anarchy?
I had an argument once, in a pub, with an anarchosyndicalist. We’d both been on the same protest march so…
Stranger than fiction
Salman Rushdie on writing in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen
My only home-schooling success
‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your…
Apocalypse in East Finchley
I was mansplaining to my wife earlier this week about why we ought to be very, very concerned by the…
You can misquote me on that
The internet is taking the joy out of citations
The heroine of the plains
Calamity Jane’s legend as brave frontierswoman, crack shot and compassionate nurse to the wounded was nurtured largely by herself. The truth, says Sam Leith, was dismayingly different
