What Meccano taught me
Elsewhere in England this weekend, grimly sweating middle-aged men were planning Operation Save Big Dog, Operation Red Meat and Operation…
We should be thankful for the Sackler family’s philanthropy
When the whole opioid crisis blew up, the Sackler family — whose fortune was substantially built on getting thousands of…
Prince Andrew is fighting a PR battle – and losing
My late grandfather, the editor and columnist John Junor, nurtured fondly throughout his career the conviction that nobody could be…
The modern economy is built on addiction
Two stories, side-by-side in theSunday paper I was looking at online. The first — ‘Strip Dame Dopesick ofher title’ —…
My fight with Viagogo
My wife had a brilliant idea for my 12-year-old daughter’s Christmas present: tickets to go and see Sigrid (a pop…
Selling the dream
Love her or loathe her, Enid Blyton and the safe, sunny world she cleverly marketed will remain a publishing phenomenon, says Sam Leith
Meghan woz right
The Duchess of Sussex’s legal ding-dong with the Mail on Sunday (which published her private correspondence with her father) has…
The forever ‘war on Christmas’
It seems to get earlier each year, doesn’t it? It’s not yet even December, and the Mail on Sunday has…
The paradoxical integrity of our dodgy honours system
We are told that the Prince of Wales had no idea at the time that his underlings were offering to sell…
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,…
