Life
How to deal with the Blob
Michael Gove has been under fire this week for ‘sacking’ Sally Morgan as chair of Ofsted. You’d think he’d be…
Battle for Britain
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Death of a team
Englishmen used to be deported to Australia as a punishment. Now they get sent back to England as an act…
Dear Mary
Q. I gave a copy of Dan Russel the Fox by Somerville and Ross to a couple I know to be…
London for aliens
Lanes of London serves street food to people who hate streets; that is, it exists to soothe the still-curious mouths…
Lumpen
A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of…
London for aliens
Lanes of London serves street food to people who hate streets; that is, it exists to soothe the still-curious mouths…
Death of a team
Englishmen used to be deported to Australia as a punishment. Now they get sent back to England as an act…
Women’s ways
Liverpool manager Bill Shankly was once challenged with the story that for their wedding anniversary treat he had taken his…
High life
Gstaad If a catastrophic avalanche were to crush the Davos convention hall, where the fat cats of this world were…
Low life
I shifted a chest of drawers that hadn’t been moved for years, and found an old photograph lying among the…
Real life
Drip, drip, drip. The noise of my downstairs London conversion flat, where the plumbing was fitted by turn-of-the-century sadists who…
Long life
When one is in one’s seventies, as I am, one begins to fear the horror of dementia and to carry…
Bridge
I always find it impossible to sleep when I’ve played poorly, and last night just one sleeping pill was never…
Gates’ exit
In Virgil’s Aeneid the hero Aeneas escapes from Hades via one of two gates, one made of ivory and the…
no. 299
Black to play. This position is from Aronian-Van Wely, Wijk aan Zee 2014. Having already clinched first prize, Aronian’s only…
Burns Night address
In Competition 2832 you were invited to compose an address to an item of food. The assignment was inspired by…
2147: Amazing performance
Each of the 22 across solutions, in clue order, contributes one unchecked letter to a two-word phrase (13,9) in Chambers…
to 2144: Leonids
The work was ‘THE TAMING OF THE (1D) Shrew’. ‘Shrew’ is suggested by 15, 27 and 33. The ‘Shrew’ of…
More lessons from Sweden
This Saturday night I’ll be staying in to watch the final two episodes of The Bridge, the Scandinavian detective series…
The battle for Britain
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24 hours in a Qatari jail cell
This column nearly didn’t appear. Another 24 hours and I would have trumped the late Jeffrey Bernard with the single…
Dear Mary
Q. At a private screening of a documentary about the artist David Bomberg, a woman sitting near me in the…
Burns Night bottles
Give us this day our daily bread: those are also words of great culinary significance. Even if the ‘bread’ takes…
Out
I managed to grab the TLS last week before my husband stuffed it in his overcoat pocket and lost it…
