Life
Aussie life
Coined, as it was, by a dead white man whose oeuvre is considered one of the crowning achievements of Western…
Language
No language column can ignore Professor Brendan Murphy’s extraordinary 78-word definition of ‘woman’. As you know, when he was questioned…
Puzzle No. 710
White to play. J. Polgar-Carlsen, Casual blitz game, Madrid 2022. Carlsen’s last move 15…Ra8-c8 was a losing blunder. How did…
Knickerbocker glory
I grew up by the seaside. More precisely, I grew up near South Shields, on the north-east coast – somewhere…
Solution to 2560: Obit VI
The perimetric names are NIJINSKY, NEVER SAY DIE, CREPELLO, THE MINSTREL, ROBERTO and TEENOSO, six of the nine Derby winners…
Prosaic
In Competition No. 3256, you were invited to take a well-known poem and recast it as a short story. Ben…
2563: Areas for development
11 Across (two words) suggests the other unclued lights, which are all one-word anagrams of words of a kind (one…
Nepo’s playbook
Ian Nepomniachtchi is back for more. The former world championship challenger left his rivals in the dust at the Candidates…
The Battle for Britain
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The turf
Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was…
Low life
All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those…
Real life
The British Gas engineers arrived in convoy, and the dust from their tyres flew into the air as they came…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. This year once again my company took a small group of clients to lunch at Royal Ascot. Our guests…
High life
Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky.…
Toby Young, I salute you
It’s started again. Sixteen years ago, another ‘Toby Young’ kept appearing in my email inbox. I’d created a Google Alert…
The happiness paradox
In the 1980s, the great advertising writer John Webster described the following paradox. As he saw it, the dream of…
We’ll always have wine
‘Club’ is a four-letter word. Whenever a club is mentioned in the press, it will inevitably be portrayed as a…
Pinch
Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking,…
Bridge
In one respect, it would be so much easier to play a game like poker or chess than bridge; if…
Aussie life
Perhaps we could pay tribute to the US Supreme Court’s courageous decision to remove an entitlement to wholesale abortion that…
Language
Is it time to revisit how we define the word ‘racism’? Early in the 20th century the settled definition became…
Solution to 2559: Platinum upgrade
The perimeter, starting at square 38, yields six of the CITIES created to commemorate the Platinum Jubilee: DONCASTER, MILTON KEYNES,…
Measure for measure
In Competition No. 3255, you were invited to submit a poem about imperial measures. Brian Bilston’s terrific poem ‘The Empire’s…
Puzzle No. 709
White to play. Miles-Pritchett, Lloyds Bank Masters 1982. Tony Miles found a powerful counter to the queenside threats. What did…
Maximum mischief
Forbidden things have a secret charm – that delicious paradox applies to the chessboard just as it does in life.…
