Features
Forever war: will Zelensky and Putin be brought to an exhausted peace?
Volodymyr Zelensky stood proudly on the steps of 10 Downing Street this week, flanked by Sir Keir Starmer and the…
Revealed: Andy Burnham’s reassuringly bland Cambridge years
There appears to be a missing chapter in the story of Andy Burnham. Depending on the whims of voters in…
From Holbein to Snapchat, how royals have mastered their own image
When Aston Villa won the Europa League recently, the focus was less on the football than on the Prince of…
Thanks to Trump, Tehran is winning
Among examples used to demonstrate the law of unintended consequences is the possibly apocryphal ‘cobra effect’. British colonial administrators in…
Might England just do it in the World Cup?
The World Cup has never been just a football tournament. Even if we don’t realise it at the time, it…
‘Make Germany normal again’: an interview with Germany’s exiled spy chief
Hans-Georg Maassen is an unlikely dissident. In his trademark three-piece suits and small glasses, he looks more like a law…
Norman Balon was much more than ‘London’s rudest landlord’
Norman Balon, who has died at the age of 99, missed the point when he defined himself as ‘London’s rudest…
My love for black and white birds
All my life I have been obsessed by black and white birds. Magpies are my tormentors, my morning omens of…
Decluttering is the ultimate act of love
‘You are going to die before me and leave me to deal with this, and I will curse your soul…
Russia won’t give up Armenia without a fight
How do you fight an election if you’re under house arrest? If you’re the Russian-Armenian businessman Samvel Karapetyan, once the…
Tequila slammers all round!
‘Tequila, it makes me happy,/ Con Tequila it feels fine’ goes the student anthem by Terrorvision. It is midnight, somewhere…
The real ‘Thucydides Trap’ Beijing and Washington must avoid
These are good times to be a scholar of the classical world. Last summer, Donald Trump issued an order that…
Cuba is next on Trump’s hit list
It’s hot in Havana. The summer’s electrical storms have arrived, lighting up the sky, while down on the ground we’ve…
Why I take frog poison
You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What…
How Iran turned Trump’s propaganda against him
On 19 November 1941, King George and Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Woburn Abbey, home of Britain’s covert propaganda…
The Pope’s AI intervention shames our politicians
I was born into a sternly Presbyterian culture. Politically, I’m more Orange than Donald Trump’s skin tone. But today I…
‘Do you know the local MP?’ ‘Aye, she runs the sauna’; my Shetland dispatch
The Shetland Islands The SNP have had better weeks. It’s strange to think that it was only this month that…
Is the West deserting Ukraine at precisely the wrong moment?
Moscow is coming under direct drone attack, the Russian economy is creaking, patriotic bloggers are ever more apocalyptic in their…
Mocktails are pathetic
Mocktails. Even the name sounds dodgy. Who is this apparently innocuous canned drink mocking, pray? Probably you, if you’ve shelled…
Remembering my gloriously unfiltered father
Nothing can prepare you for the death of your father because, by definition, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. You have these…
Save the curlew!
Unlike last year, when drought caused many curlews in the Durham dales to delay breeding, this has been a great…
Who ruined the Southbank Centre?
Europe’s largest hub of the performing arts, which great musicians the world over once called home, is now a grim…
Weight-loss drugs killed my appetite for life
Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, which launched ChatGPT, is not overweight. Gay tech billionaires rarely are. Even so, as…
Why budgerigars are the perfect pets
Geoff Capes, two-time winner of The World’s Strongest Man competition, weighing in at 27 stone, was a budgie fancier. He…
Forties’ love: tennis serves me a perfect midlife crisis
There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon?…
