The next few week’s will be the ultimate test of Gladys Berejiklian and her New South Wales Coalition government. Will…

Well, Arthur Sinodinos turned out to be a damp squib, as I predicted. It was bad enough to denigrate the…

Has the government condemned another generation to long-term unemployment?

Ending Australia’s ore-inspired Chinese boom? Enjoy it while it lasts. The Australian economy has been carried through the Covid-19 disaster…

All racism matters and must be called out

Will the virus outwit Dan Andrews?

Does an Australian gastro legend hold the key to curing Covid?

The politicians are ruining Australia far sooner than anyone ever expected

Stroll around Florence and you’ll notice little ornate openings embedded in the walls of Renaissance palazzos. They look like doorways…

The old-fashioned charm of holiday camps

The mood in Lebanon is for revolution

Diversity training doesn’t work

Britain is losing the race to recovery

Animal viruses spill over to humans more often than you think

Could this be the end for Europe’s last dictator?

How can Boris deal with the looming question of IndyRef2?

It was obvious that closing schools would hit the poorest hardest, inflicting permanent damage and deepening inequality. While many private…

Arguments about the purpose or indeed very existence of anything resembling the House of Lords would have struck classical democratic…

Home In fine weather with calm seas, 565 migrants in four days crossed the Channel in small craft. French officials…

Some like it hot Are heatwaves becoming a devalued currency? Last year the Met Office defined a heatwave as three…

I have known Ghislaine Maxwell for more than 40 years, since she was a student at Balliol. I always liked…

The future of offices Sir: I agree with much of Gerard Lyons’s article about the future of the capital (‘London…

Radio 4 recently ran an adaptation of Albert Camus’s The Plague in which the protagonist, Dr Bernard Rieux, was transformed…

At a low moment in late March, I suggested that all large companies should consider temporary cuts in executive salaries…

Chris Packham is widely seen as the most extreme of well-known animal rights activists. His obsessions against hunting and shooting…

I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business —…

Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get…

Kamala Harris, the new Democratic vice-presidential nominee, certainly looks the part. Barack Obama once called her ‘the best-looking attorney general…

By more than a mile the best book I have read during the pandemic is Tim Finch’s Peace Talks. It…

This debut novel, which opens with ‘a high- school lacrosse party in 1999 and the rumour of a sexual assault,’…

On 27 November 1960 African and Indian diplomats visiting the UN in New York opened their mail to find a…

The concluding novel of Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet is a family affair. Her intergenerational group of seeming strangers from the…

Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was…

Mordew ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, as Elton John nearly sang. If they escape the ravages…

One of the strange effects that modernist, progressive society has had on what the French Annales school would refer to…

For more than 100 years Paris has been as much a symbol and a myth as a geographical reality. The…

I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a…

Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete…

Cory Doctorow on the vast, impersonal forces manipulating our lives

Just imagine: you reach a certain age and you become your own unreliable narrator. Gerald Walker, the protagonist of Richard…

Like a lot of Australians I look at what is happening in America with sad bemusement if not alarm.  Over…

Kathy Lette says that during lockdown she has been reading Dickens. Her choice illustrates the enduring appeal of Charles Dickens…

Richard Bratby talks to Birmingham Opera Company’s new music director Alpesh Chauhan about his Brummie roots, Bruckner and how his BAME heritage is a non-story

I spent half an hour this week listening to a woman make a plaster cast of her vulva. Kat Harbourne,…

Matteo Garrone’s live-action version of Pinocchio is visually sumptuous and there are some enchanting characters (my favourite: Snail). And unlike…

If it’s a test of a good documentary series that it takes us deep into an unknown, even unimaginable world,…

Among the spoils of a lockdown clear-out was a box of my grandmother’s books: Woolf, Austen, Mitford and The Complete…

Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished…

So the madness continues. Planes full of passengers are going everywhere. Theatres full of ghosts are going bust. My first…

I’ve always been a bit of a ‘prepper’. Pre-2020 that’s something I would’ve never admitted. It’s embarrassing to say I…

Serifos   There’s no high life here, only family life, so I’ve been hitting the books about great Greeks of…

‘There’s no need to wipe down your tray table,’ screeched Heidi, chief steward of the ‘amazing team you have looking…

We have beans, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, butternut squash, plums and strawberries growing in our garden. I dug up and replanted…

The unclued lights from 1 Down to 44 are of a kind with 4 overrunning a barline into 22. Ignore…

Black to play. Efimov–Bronstein, Kiev 1941. Normally White seeks glory in the King’s Gambit, but here Bronstein scored a lightning…

I am frankly repulsed by the latest cheats, exposed after the online invitational Alt and OCBL tournaments. When F2F bridge…

Q. On my way to Devon recently I stopped for lunch with an impeccably mannered friend. He produced first crab…

Sometimes when I ask my stertorous husband in his armchair whether he is asleep, he replies with a start: ‘Just…

I started a dating site last Sunday. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but I’ve become a kind of…

You are, shall we say, a famous commentator, one of a tiny elite in the British media. You are paid…

Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of…

The unclued lights, 3/34, 12/31, 26/1A/33, 35/9, 39 and 18 PEAKE (an anagram of the red highlighted letters), are six…

In Competition No. 3161 you were invited to supply a sonnet with certain rhyme words to be used in a…

Does Bear Grylls play chess? If he does, I’m sure he would favour the King’s Gambit. As chess openings go,…