Features
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…
Beware of the hawks
Supporters of intervention in Syria will be the first to desert Cameron when the going gets tough
Unspeakable persecution
Don’t expect the government to raise its voice for Syria’s Christians
Frontline battle
The charity that could make the public love social workers– and why many social workers don’t like it
Welcome to Ryanair Britain
Local councils, banks, railway companies and the taxman have all learned the art of ‘pirate pricing’
Letter from Somaliland
Ayan Mahamoud, one of the organisers of Hargeysa’s International Book Fair, has all the girly vulnerability of a factory-tested steel…
A novelist’s view
Do writers really need inspiring landscapes? Or the opposite?
Notes on…Rome
Leave Florence and Sienna to the aesthetes. Let the in-crowd do Naples and Palermo. For the amateur Italophile, Rome is…
Forget ‘militant’ atheists. Fight the real fanatics
It’s August, and you are a journalist stuck in the office without an idea in your head. What to write?…
The missing middle
The great stabilising force in our society is disappearing fast
The line to nowhere
The government’s high-speed rail plans will never be implemented
The Bo show
China’s fallen princeling has a new role to play: one he may not enjoy
Gypsy business
Travelling people are putting their entrepreneurial skills to increasingly impressive use
The anniversary addiction
Centenaries now seem to be the only reason that publishers and concert planners do anything at all
No saint
G.K. Chesterton was a great journalist, not an angel
Binge benefits
The occasional alcoholic blowout is much to be preferred to steady, everyday drinking
Notes on…Walking in the Auvergne
The homicidal sheepdog that launched itself at me from behind a grassy hillock, had the look of a demented hearth…
Dangerous medicine
A senior surgeon says Jeremy Hunt’s NHS reforms will do more harm than good
Bordering on insanity
Gibraltar is just one geographical oddity in a world full of them
No more steak tartare?
Stricter food rules won’t make you any safer – but they could ruin many small restaurants
Putin’s own Cold War
Russia is ever more hostile to the US. But the US no longer needs to care
Love-making in Water
Seals — well, they rhyme with steel — can stand the cold. And they can even dive and mate at…
Self-pity doesn’t pay
The ‘intern justice’ movement is preposterous – and damaging
St Tropez Notebook
I recently had to spend a great deal of time attempting to clear my name from a ludicrous assertion in…
