Life
Bridge
Everyone knows him, but hardly anyone can pronounce his name — which is why Jacek Pszczola is universally called Pepsi.…
Pauline conversion
Paul Keres is the only chess player to have appeared on the euro currency, his face adorning the two-euro piece…
no. 449
White to play. This position is from Mareco-Nakamura, Pro-League, chess.com 2017. Can you spot White’s winning coup?Answers to me at…
A to P
In Competition No. 2990 you were invited to submit a poem of 16 lines in which the lines begin with…
2302: Urbane turban
The solutions to twelve clues, all of which lack definition, have to be adapted as the title indicates before the…
to 2299: Pieces of Eight
The unclued lights, including 28/3 in its English translation, are compositions by Carl Nielsen, (i.e. pieces of 8 Down). First…
Dear Mary
Q. We had some people up from London for a very long weekend. We put on an extra-special do, costing…
The fall of Paris
Paris used to be the most self-confident city in the world. Brash, assertive, boastful: Manhattan claimed to be the best.…
High life
A cloudless sky, crunchy spring snow, longer, warmer days. I’ve finally got in some good skiing, twisting around moguls like…
The Battle for Britain
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Girls
Sir Roger Gale sounds like an old-bufferish knight of the shires, but he once worked as a disc-jockey on a…
Real life
‘Mesdames et messieurs, allow me to introduce you to your meals,’ said the waiter. Oh lordy, I thought. Here we…
The liberals and the deplorables
In America, an argument has broken out among journalists, writers and intellectuals in the aftermath of the presidential election about…
How I learned to love the airport bus
After landing at Gatwick, the plane taxied for five minutes or so and then came to a halt in the…
Low life
My joints were aching suddenly and unaccountably — fingers, wrists, elbows, knees, toes — so I cried off the dinner…
High life
At a chic dinner party last week, a friendly chow as big and black as a dog can be without…
Low life
After circuiting Spain by train, I went east to Italy, stopping on the way at the French border town of…
Meet with
Don’t tell my husband, but I have been having doubts. (He never reads this column, so our secret is safe.)…
Real life
Someone has given the builder boyfriend an iPhone and things will never be the same. Until now, he has always…
Was it football or just mutimillionaires cheating?
Few sporting events in history have been greeted with such swivel-eyed, table-pounding hysteria as Barcelona’s comeback to overturn a 4-0…
The weird ways in which people avoid cleaning up after their dogs
One of the most important debates in Britain’s history took place in Westminster earlier this week. The issue was absolutely…
The turf
If the championship for training jumpers went to a set of gallops rather than to a trainer it would not…
Gettysburg revisited
In Competition No. 2989 you were invited to submit a version of the Gettysburg Address as it might have been…
2301: Age of extremes
Eight unclued lights are of a kind; the remaining two complete four words from a quote, which is appropriately positioned…
to 2298: NOИ
The unclued lights are titles of Russian novels minus their ‘and’ (И in Russian): 17 CRIME and 9 PUNISHMENT (Dostoevsky),…
