Features
Notes on…The house museums of Paris
It doesn’t matter how many times they expand the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’s past is so colossally rich…
Ed Miliband’s last laugh
Unless something drastic changes in the polls, the Tories will pay dearly for treating Miliband as a joke. And so will the rest of us
A Blairite for Ed
Tristram Hunt represents the slice of Labour that Miliband most needs to hold on to
Old friends
Facebook makes reinventing yourself at university much trickier
My 50 weddings
The lessons of a perpetual guest
Merkel will win – but why?
Germany’s integrationalist elite are prepared to pay out forever to protect the euro
The mystery of ‘plebgate’
Was there a conspiracy against Andrew Mitchell? And why have the police gone quiet on the subject?
Notes on …Vodka
James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I…
Fresh wit and wisdom
A selection from the latest edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, edited by Gyles Brandreth
A Transylvanian notebook
Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…
The end of the party
The decline of tribal loyalties spells the end of the big traditional political organisations
Braveheart banking
The RBS disaster has a distinctly Scottish flavour
An Anglican atheist
Richard Dawkins shows off his human side
Name of shame
The importance of not being Nigel
Missile morality
Our leaders should stop talking about ‘justice’ in Syria – honesty may be the best and only realistic policy
Lebanon’s dilemma
Beirut News that the Syrian regime has agreed to hand in its arsenal of chemical weapons is a great…
The ideal death show
I am in a yurt, talking about death. Everyone is seated in a circle, and I am the next-to-last person…
Notes on…Classic cruising
We arrive at the tiny Greek island of Sikinos on a blustery day, making landing rather difficult. Is there transport…
Obama’s wobbly warpath
The West does have a dog in the Syria fight. But it’s on the losing side of the losing side
A poll-watching President
Obama has realised that America has lost its appetite for war
Door into the dark
Seamus Heaney’s poetry from the other side of Northern Ireland’s divide
Italians for Maggie
The Circolo Culturale Margaret Thatcher, which wants to institute an Anglo-Saxon Tory party in Italy, has a plan
The revenge of Parliament
Today’s MPs are no longer scared of the whips. Instead, they are scared of their constituents. That’s a good thing
Hard to swallow
Hospital food isn’t a joke. It’s a scandal
Notes on…Sicily
It could be, in Sicily, there comes a time when you’ve had your fill of seaside calamari and cheap white…
