Features
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?…
Burnham’s fate will be decided in the Strait of Hormuz
In the last few days, the government has performed two extraordinary about-turns. On Tuesday, it was revealed that the Treasury…
‘Being a Labour mayor in Manchester is playing politics on easy mode’: Is Andy Burnham up to the job of PM?
When the Labour party football team played a group of journalists at Loftus Road two years ago the hacks won…
The performative hypocrisy of the pro-Palestine mob
You haven’t really made it in life until you’ve addressed the Oxford Union. That’s how I feel upon reading the…
The National Garden Scheme is the perfect antidote to Chelsea’s vanity
Shortly before the New Gardens Organiser at the National Garden Scheme (NGS) is due to arrive at our farmhouse in…
No one recognised me on the Cannes red carpet!
‘We are taking the picture to Cannes,’ said John Gore, the producer and financier of My Duchess, my new film…
What lists of our greatest novels get wrong
‘Where are all my favourite parts?’ Arnold Schoenberg asked, on being presented with a severe academic analysis of the Eroica…
Cultural amnesia explains our fury at the past
I was in Newcastle the other day and found myself standing beneath Lord Grey’s Monument. The column is 135 feet…
