Life
Quotidian
In Competition No. 3009 you were invited to submit a poem about a domestic object. I set this challenge…
Dear Mary
Q. I’m shortly to host a very large family gathering. Everyone will be related to the same ancestor, so we…
to 2318: Groundwork
SOIL (9) — cryptically indicated by ISLAND IN THE SUN (1A), the title of a SONG (40) recorded by HARRY…
Greenland and India
‘Remember what the fellow said — it’s not a bally bit of use every prospect pleasing if man is vile,’…
2321: Cleaner
One unclued light, defined by the title, is a word that can be divided into three words; each of these…
A menu for the emmets
Tate St Ives is a pale 1980s block, with a fat rounded porte cochère and sea-stained walls. It is the…
High life
I’ve stayed far away from the new barbarians with their choppers, tank-like cars, home theatres on board, and fridge-shaped super…
The Battle for Britain
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Low life
Five and the Red One are a German covers band. It’s probably the most uninspiring name for a rock band…
Real life
‘This situation is Rorke’s Drift,’ said the builder boyfriend, after our proposed renovations were objected to at the parish council’s…
England’s new heroes were real Test Match specials
The weather forecast last Saturday promised 100 per cent likelihood of rain. I like that formulation: it doesn’t leave much…
Parents, not schools, are key to the knowledge gap
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has just published a report looking at the attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged 16-year-olds…
The turf
Khalid Abdullah, John Gosden and Frankie Dettori — owner, trainer and jockey — already figured among the great names of…
Bridge
Thank heaven I am on holiday! For the past week I have been up until 4 a.m., glued to the…
Classical conundrum
The great Mikhail Botvinnik excoriated chess played at fast time limits. Botvinnik believed that classical chess at time limits of,…
no. 468
Black to play. This is a position from Kramnik–Carlsen, Leuven Blitz 2017. How did the world champion win even more…
Bridge
This is a great time to be a bridge professional — not just for the world’s top players, who have…
British championship
This year’s British Championship starts on Saturday and is endowed with an outstanding prize fund supplied by Capital Developments Waterloo…
no. 467
White to play. This position is from McShane-Istratescu, London 2013. How did White conclude his kingside attack with a fine…
New beginnings
In Competition No. 3008 you were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the…
to 2317:370
The answer to the subtraction sum in the title is 1947. So all the unclued lights are celebrities who celebrate…
Dear Mary
Q. My children are very lucky in that we have bought them all flats. However, they are now renting out…
Epiphanic
‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported…
Wild life
Kenya We are on the beach, where our home is full of dystopian stories. My daughter Eve is whizzing…
The right kind of dumbing down
Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of…
