In a week of absolute madness, it’s hard to know which is the more deranged fantasy: that we can do…

You might think that the law is old, stodgy, stuck in the past and opposed to reform. It is all…

Chinese aggression and the New Cold War Over recent weeks commentators both in Australia and abroad have drawn attention to…

China has its tentacles in far too many places

Mob violence and chaos play into Trump’s hands

Science, first casualty of the gender wars

‘Black Lives Matter’ is hurting the very people it claims to support

Virtue-signalling, woke demonstrations are misplaced

Without a miracle, big government is here to stay

Where does the Democrat presidential candidate really stand on Israel?

On the greatest act of political misfeasance in our history

The truth about America’s police culture

This week marked 500 years since the beginning of the two-week festival of jousting, feasting and general splendour that came…

Can Britain’s trees be saved?

What’s behind South Korea’s Covid success?

Boris’s new permanent secretary is a complicated choice for No. 10

The quarantine debacle could cripple British tourism

Our public figures must rediscover the true spirit of liberty

Last week shattered all my sense of stability and permanence in New York, the city I’ve called home since 2012…

The Colston chronicles Who, exactly, was Sir Edward Colston? Colston was born into a family of merchants and spent the…

A lockdown diary is an oddly negative thing. At the dinner parties that we aren’t going to, we aren’t discussing…

There is a grim inevitability to the trickle of round-robin letters from scientists who feel aggrieved at the government’s handling…

Home The government lurched uncertainly in dealing with coronavirus. Not all years in primary schools would after all return before…

Hong Kong’s future Sir: So we have a moral duty to protect the people of Hong Kong and guide them…

When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction…

From Monday, you will be required by law to wear a face covering on public transport. Paradoxically, this is a…

All logic suggests that the 14-day quarantine for arrivals from abroad really is, as Michael O’Leary of Ryanair put it,…

The Eastern Orthodox Church has decided that yoga is incompatible with Christianity. This is an enormous problem for me, as…

The government’s promised ‘pathway to citizenship’ to Hong Kong people is wonderful, but has the Foreign Office arranged a get-out…

A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always…

I couldn’t disagree more with Sir Keir Starmer (it was ‘completely wrong,’ ‘it shouldn’t have been done in that way’)…

Dara McAnulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland. He has autism; so do his brother, sister and mother —…

Beth, the protagonist of Joanna Briscoe’s The Seduction, reminded me of Clare in Tessa Hadley’s debut, Accidents in the Home.…

What does Jony Ive, the designer of Apple’s iPhone, have in common with Peter Perez Burdett, the first Englishman to…

It is winter in north Yorkshire. On the brink of New Year, Jake, a laconic, isolated former farmhand in his…

History is only as good as its sources. It is limited largely to what has survived of written records, and…

This book could not have been published at a better time — nor, in a way, at a worse time.…

In her 2010 novel So Much for That, Lionel Shriver examined the American healthcare system with a spiky sensitivity. Big…

These days the world seems to end with staggering regularity. From the financial crisis to Brexit to Trump to a…

The Spartans were not the only Greeks to die at Thermopylae. On the fateful final morning of the battle, when…

This week the Australia Chamber Orchestra should have been delighting audiences with their usual brilliant performances to celebrate the 30th…

The National Theatre’s programme of livestreamed shows continues with the Donmar’s 2014 production of Coriolanus starring Tom Hiddleston. The play…

Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is about four African-American vets who return to Vietnam to locate the body of their…

The coronavirus crisis offers theatre a golden opportunity to break free of the structures that have held it back for years, says William Cook

Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix…

The roots of incel subculture – and its magnificent memes – stretch back to Goethe’s Werther and beyond, says Nina Power

Noël Coward was so right that his words have become a cliché: it is indeed extraordinary how potent cheap music…

Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals;…

Black to play, Ding Liren–Daniil Dubov, Lindores Abbey Rapid Challenge, May 2020. Dubov’s rook is under attack, but his next…

Have you ever been at a bridge event and heard someone exclaim: ‘He Grosvenor’d me!’ They are referring to a…

The Lindores Abbey Distillery in Fife, Scotland was an idyllic setting for an exciting rapid event last year, won by…

In Competition No. 3152 you were invited to supply a poem about the joys — or otherwise — of the…

More than two months: who would have thought it possible? Before the great closure, I had been trying to decide…

The unclued lights (individually or four pairs) lead to a word or phrase which includes a thematic component. Across 1…

Vienna Somebody once described Vienna as a top opera performed by understudies. The remark was unquestionably witty, but utterly false…

I walked to the salon in fiery sunshine. Gorgeous, zaftig Elody was wearing a short satin dressing gown of silver…

From time to time, every industry must adapt to some inconvenient technological advance. Suddenly, some part of what you offer…

I wasn’t surprised to see that a woman whose father died at a care home in Bicester in April has…

Q. Now we are instructed to mingle again, I’m sure I’m not alone in being surprised to find an awkwardness…

The two horses looked like they had never seen anything like it. They had wound up in a dark car…

The unclued lights Across are Shakespearean LORDS and the Down ones are LADIES. (The plant ‘lords and ladies’ is an…

Horse racing, it turns out, wasn’t the first sport back in post-lockdown action: that distinction went to pigeon racing when…

That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici…