Life
Solution to 2561: Ports
The unclued entry RECYCLING thematically links six unclued cyclic non-word permutations that appear in the systematic order GCYCLIN, NGCYCLI, INGCYCL,…
Filmericks
In Competition No. 3257, you were invited to summarise a film in limerick form. A nod to Ezra Haber Glenn,…
Has identity politics had its day?
Have we reached peak woke? In Hollywood, that seems to be the emerging consensus. Thanks to the box office success…
Silver and gold
The ‘English chess explosion’ that began in the 1970s produced a bumper crop of grandmasters, which meant that by the…
The Battle for Britain: Michael Heath
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High life
Now that the weakest Wimbledon since 1973 – the year of the boycott – is over, a few thoughts about…
Low life
My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the…
Bridge
The return to pre-Covid normality has been slow and a bit dispiriting. Attendance at the popular English tournaments has been…
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…
