Features
There’s still everything to play for in America’s election
The first presidential debate of 2024 changed history by killing off Joe Biden’s career. The second presidential debate was nowhere…
Why are Chinese students giving up on architecture?
I recently convened an urban studies summer school in a top university in Shanghai and asked the assembled class of…
Xi speech warrior: Elon Musk’s love affair with China
Elon Musk revels in the role of ‘free speech absolutist’. Last week, for instance, he jumped to the defence of…
The expensive business of quoting poetry
Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of…
Pity the restaurant critic
An atom is made of protons, electrons and neutrons, and protons are made of quarks, and a quark is the…
Bring back the briefcase!
The final straw was seeing Jeremy Hunt wearing one shortly before the summer recess – and not just when riding…
The ‘British Muslim patriot’ on a mission to get Farage into No. 10
Few people had heard of Zia Yusuf before he spoke at Reform’s final campaign rally in Birmingham. But after a…
Miliband’s empty energy promise
Though not quite up there with history’s great political texts, Ed Miliband’s letter this week to the director of the…
The deep sorrow of losing a sibling
My sister died last summer, before her time, at 58. Her death has left me shaken with sorrow and remorse:…
Inside an MP’s inbox
There is nothing so ex as an ex-MP, Tam Dalyell used to say. Now that parliament has returned from recess,…
Has the RHS forgotten its roots?
Chekhov had no illusions about horticulture (‘It’s a nice, healthy business to be in, but there are passions and wars…
Is Germany’s far right about to go mainstream?
‘We need to deport, deport, deport!’ Björn Höcke, leader of the Alternative für Deutschland in Thuringia, emphasises each word with…
What China wants from Russia
On the face of it, the ‘no limits’ partnership between Russia and China declared weeks before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine…
The death of free speech in Britain
In Michel Houellebecq’s satirical novel Soumission, the French elite submits to Islamic rule rather than accept a National Front government.…
What will become of George Orwell’s archives?
The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the…
The unappetising truth about tasting menus
The tasting menu has fallen from fashion, and this is good. They are a curio – a window to the…
Save our steam engines!
Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens…
How big business pushed up vet bills
I was on my way to a Pilates class when I spotted Paul waving at me urgently from across the…
Keep fun out of funerals
There are two untraditional ways to take your leave of this world in Britain. The bleaker is the ‘direct cremation’…
The myth of Britain’s fleeing non-doms
According to popular imagination, the skies over Britain have been full these past few months of fleets of private jets…
An American’s love letter to Britain
My wife and I relocated to the UK a few months ago after spending the past 37 years in the…
The dark truth about Hollywood assistants
Anew stop has been added to the map of Movie Star Homes and Crime Scenes, on sale at LAX airport:…
Can Kamala Harris bluff her way to the White House?
Chicago ‘There are no disasters,’ said Boris Johnson, who was born in America. ‘Only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh…
The depraved world of chess cheats
Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess player from Russia, supposedly tried to poison a younger rival at the Dagestan Chess Championship…
A connoisseur’s guide to collecting matchboxes
We’d been told it would be a ‘brat’ summer, characterised by its inventor, the singer Charli XCX, as ‘a pack…
