The Week
Diary
Spring Cannot Be Cancelled arrives on the doorstep. It is a gloriously illustrated book by Martin Gayford about his conversations…
Roman culture wars
Identity politics empowers people to make all sorts of claims, not because they are true but because it makes them…
Barometer
A long way from home A walrus turned up off the Pembrokeshire coast, thousands of miles south of its normal…
Letters
Meghan’s adroitness Sir: Tanya Gold suggests that people criticise Meghan Markle because she is mixed race and a woman, and…
Barometer
Calculated risk It is a year since Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team published the paper that inspired the government to…
Meghan and stoicism
Meghan Markle seems to see herself as a ‘victim’. Had she called herself a victima in Rome, it would have…
Diary
Piers Morgan may have been the UK equivalent of a TV shock-jock, but there’s another side to him. I’ve known…
Portrait of the week
Home A Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, 48, was charged with the kidnap and murder of 33-year-old Sarah Everard, who…
A fight on our hands
The power wielded by Nicola Sturgeon and her Scottish government means it’s hard to hold her to account for basic…
Portrait of the week
Home The world was agog, some in tears, some in synchronised toe-curling, as the Duchess of Sussex and her husband…
Diary
Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts, heteronormative hegemony. Are my right-on credentials right on enough? Am I…
Touching distance
Since the start of this year, cases of Covid-19 have been in decline. Hospital admissions have fallen 80 per cent…
Letters
Spinning plates Sir: Kate Andrews is right to highlight the looming risk of inflation (‘Rishi’s nightmare’, 6 March), but to…
Barometer
Good for the goose The government indicated that it will ban foie gras, out of animal welfare concerns. While it…
Salmond’s revenge
Ancient Greeks were not slow to express their enthusiasm for taking revenge. Observing the recent proceedings in the Scottish parliament,…
Portrait of the Week
Home First-dose coronavirus vaccinations totalled more than 20 million. A study suggested that in the over-eighties, a single dose of…
Barometer
French lessons France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to three years in jail, with two of them suspended, for…
Letters
The key to the Union Sir: ‘Love-bombing’ the Scottish electorate with supplemental spending in devolved areas (‘The break-up’, 27 February)…
Invaluable wrongdoing
Modern historians, excoriating the past evils of e.g. slavery and imperialism are taking the understanding of history back to its…
A democratic deficit
The campaign for a Scottish parliament was rooted in the notion of a ‘democratic deficit’. Scotland kept voting Labour but…
Diary
Santa Monica is a soothing place to be locked down. I moved here from New York for four months in…
No offence
At a time when resources are scarce, the Merseyside Constabulary must have thought long and hard about its recent advertising…
Letters
Nothing to fear Sir: Many of us await the day when we can travel abroad for much-anticipated holidays — but…
Barometer
State of the art Graffiti on Edvard Munch’s first version of ‘The Scream’ was revealed to be the work of…
The enquiring minds of Egypt
The government has plans to fund a new research agency to back ‘cutting-edge science’. Ptolemaios (Ptolemy) I (367-282 bc), the…
