Diary
Prue Leith: Forget home remedies — morphine is the real way to cure cramp
Is it just my age, or has summer always galloped past with indecent haste? No sooner do the reluctant leaves…
Max Hastings’s diary
The Hastingses have idyllic lives but, like most seventysomethings, we find ourselves in ever-closer proximity to mortality. We hold season…
Rachel Johnson: Getting sacked is a badge of honour. And I should know
People are still asking ‘So, how was your summer’ and mine was nice as far as it went: I didn’t…
No whisky for breakfast? But this is Scotland!
I begin my 87-day reading tour of the US, UK and Canada on a BA flight that will take me…
Joan Collins: Why are people so baffled by the title ‘Dame’?
Attending my goddaughter Cara Delevingne’s 26th birthday party at the trendy Chateau Marmont hotel in LA, I was interested to…
Richard Madeley: Thanks to Gavin Williamson, everyone is calling me ‘the Terminator’
Down here near Nice, you find most locals unsurprised by the catastrophic Genoa bridge collapse. The Italian border is only…
Ayesha Hazarika’s Edinburgh diary: The most offensive thing about Boris’s burka joke? It wasn’t original
Taking my new stand-up show Girl on Girl to the Edinburgh festival this year and playing at the prestigious venue…
Why British weather is like a bad boyfriend
The British weather is just like the worst boyfriend. The kind that keeps you in a state of permanent insecurity…
Susan Hill’s diary: The return of the eels
The swifts had not arrived by June, nary a one, though a Yorkshire Dales friend reported their return, and there…
Boris Johnson: Why we should chuck Chequers
Surely there is a bit of humbug in this outrage about the two remaining jihadi Beatles, Kotey and Elsheikh, and…
What Uber rides taught me about immigration
It was blessedly cool inside the Romanesque nave, its massive arches resisting the heat as they had done everything else…
This is what happens when you put Brexit in the hands of unbelievers
Well, we did it. No, not Brexit, the World Cup or my (somewhat less) ambitious scheme at Legal & General…
Dominic Lawson: The day Boris claimed I was an MI6 agent
Happy 190th birthday, dear Spectator. And in what fine health you are, at such an advanced age. This was hardly…
Why are men so obsessed with dieting?
In this gloriously sunny week, the cavalry horses are off on their summer break to Bodney, Norfolk. They can be…
Andrew Marr’s Diary: In praise of David Dimbleby
At Chequers last week to interview the Prime Minister, I hear some sad news of Churchill’s mouse. The story goes…
To reverse the Daily Mail’s Brexit stance would be editorial suicide
Awake to the Today programme and ordure being dumped on me by Polly Toynbee while the Mail’s legendary Dame Ann…
It’s the Year of the Slug and I’m at war with the slimy little bastards
I know some people are fretting about Brexit, and others about the drive-by violence the President is doing to the…
In my illness and old age, children give me hope
By 74 it is easy to feel that you have seen it all, done it all, that nothing much surprises…
Cressida Bonas’s diary: Why do I find wedding hats so tricky?
Monday morning. Sitting in Ed the physio’s waiting room. He is theatreland’s go-to man for fractured bones and torn muscles…
My fans say I could have won the Nobel – if it wasn’t for the bizarre sex
The family ranch, which my father acquired when I was about six years of age, lay along the banks of…
The perils of speaking in public
I spend my life moving. Over recent years it was research. Now it’s caused by that research. But I have…
In defence of Olly Robbins
After reading Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, Somerset Maugham remarked: ‘That young man holds the future of the English novel…
Enoch Powell wasn’t racist – he just craved attention
Dining in splendour beneath Van Dycks as we forked in the delicious venison, it was hard not to agree with…
Racism and the RSC: why I was a sitting duck for the arts mob
Our ducks are back. Two wild mallard have spent the last five springs on the brook which gurgles past us…
Can fiction really cure cancer?
If you write a book, even a novel, about Shakespeare you must at least consider the theory that Will of…
