The Week
The word ‘tragedy’ has lost all meaning
The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge has said the university has ‘lessons to learn from the Jason Arday tragedy’.…
How have Eurostar passengers numbers changed over the years?
Made to run A robot at the Robotic Olympiad in Beijing bettered Usain Bolt’s 100 metres record by 0.19 seconds.…
Letters: The C of E is making all the wrong choices
People power Sir: Quentin Letts’s article (‘Plastic parsons’, 22 August) underlines the dire state of the Church of England today.…
The sanctimonious campaign against Boy George
In the musical Allegra, which has just finished its run, I ran around singing, dancing and jumping on tables for…
Portrait of the week: barbecues are banned, Burnham is fooled and Farage wins Clacton
Home The temperature reached 38.1ºC at Kew Gardens, Surrey. In the West Midlands a wildfire at Stourbridge burnt down 19…
Jason Arday’s tragic death is no reason to silence the press
Physicians and the Samaritans warn against attributing suicide to a single cause. Doing so simplifies a complex tragedy. Those who…
How the ancients saw eclipses
By the 5th century bc, probably thanks to the Babylonians, enlightened Greeks were well aware that eclipses were natural phenomena.…
Letters: universities have always been a little crazy
Universities’ challenge Sir: I have spent more than three decades in academia and so Lara Brown (‘Alma madder’, 15 August)…
How often do eclipses occur?
Star turn Britain experienced a solar eclipse but not the total eclipse visible in Iceland and Spain. How often do…
Why are the young obsessed with drinking water?
Greetings from Edinburgh, where the air is full of love and seagulls. Mostly seagulls. They soar, they sweep, they swoop…
Farage needs to decide if he wants to govern – or just campaign
Nigel Farage’s likely victory in the Clacton by-election will be a hollow one. The major parties boycotted the contest: of…
Would the ancients have considered Rod Liddle a satirist?
If the great Rod Liddle was a satirist, as many columnists have suggested, he was not one in the Roman…
Letters: Cambridge University is not a victim
After Arday Sir: Lara Brown scathingly condemns Cambridge University’s acceptance of Jason Arday’s credentials (‘The fabulist’, 8 August). That it…
Letters: ‘The voice of a beleaguered Middle England’ – readers say goodbye to Rod
My all-time hero Sir: I was gutted to learn of the early death of one of my all-time heroes (8…
How much water is lost to leaks?
Diverse academia Jason Arday was heralded as Cambridge’s youngest-ever black professor when appointed professor of sociology of education in 2023.…
Should I really have my parliamentary pass revoked over a short skirt?
Labour MPs first tried to ban me from the Commons press gallery two decades ago, after I ridiculed Speaker ‘Gorbals…
Cambridge has fallen
‘What distinguishes Cambridge from Oxford,’ A.A. Milne said in 1939, ‘is that nobody who has been to Cambridge feels impelled…
Would Grok’s Odyssey be better than Nolan’s?
Elon Musk, who does not rate Christopher Nolan’s film of The Odyssey very highly, has said: ‘Before this year ends,…
Letters: the insanity of Labour’s attack on private schools
Bad education Sir: Lara Brown (‘Class warfare’, 1 August) lays bare the baleful consequences – intended and unintended – of…
Burnham is boldly going nowhere
‘Space: the final frontier.’ Six decades since Captain James T. Kirk first uttered those words, American enthusiasm for star-trekking is…
What Istanbul gave me
Why do novelists set their stories in cities or landscapes which seem to haunt them? Not the places of their…
Fantasticks, calash, noctivagation – the wonderful words of Anthony Wood
‘Things are just completely coming full circle here. For me to be here with you all in the heart of…
