It would be a brave passenger indeed who hopped onto a plane where the pilot hadn’t the faintest clue about…

Sorry to say this – but apologies by political figures seem to have become completely meaningless. In a visit to…

Don’t blame the ABC

Labor’s election truce on climate change

More Budget blues

Alternative framings of the Ukraine war

Desperation strikes as Kiwis lose their democracy

This time, it’s a war against people just like us

Is anybody checking up on the reports about adverse effects to vaccination?

Look after the forgotten people

The war has helped to resurrect Poland’s Catholic church

The English Rock Garden, the magnum opus of the great gardening writer, horticulturist and plant collector Reginald Farrer, is an…

Palm Sunday in Perugia. Umbrians were scuttling around with twigs and leaves, but I was in town to celebrate another…

Why so many African leaders support Putin

Greek-style marinated lamb, Greek salad and tzatziki

Niall Ferguson and David Petraeus on Russia’s mistakes, Xi’s plans and the lessons of Iraq

How Putin weaponised the Russian Orthodox church

Can Russia ever atone for Putin’s sins?

Off duty How many non-doms are there in the UK? – In the year ending 2020, 75,700 people filled in…

In just over a week’s time, Emmanuel Macron will most likely win a second term. He has the opponent he…

Attending an impromptu birthday party in the office is not the most heinous of crimes, and of course Britain’s fixation…

This week has been Passiontide, which means lots of wonderful plainsong in the choir of Canterbury Cathedral as my predecessors…

Backward devolution Sir: Thanks for once again highlighting the many issues with government in Scotland (‘Sturgeon’s secret state’, 9 April).…

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, travelled to Kyiv in secret and joined President Volodymyr Zelensky for the cameras in…

St. Petersburg University in Russia is (desperately?) inviting scholars worldwide to a conference in September celebrating Mikhail Speransky. It was…

I was walking last week from Canary Wharf tube station to my flat in east London – not far, little…

Joe Biden announced in November: ‘Transgender people are some of the bravest Americans I know.’ When Conservative MP Jamie Wallis…

More exciting news arrives from Britain’s dimmest university, Durham, which is embarking on a programme to ‘decolonise’ mathematics. About time.…

The end of the Cold War was used by the victors to unite Germany. To balance this, Europhiles created a…

Before the war in Ukraine, ministers and Tory MPs believed a fixedpenalty notice for the Prime Minister would mean the…

Perhaps I should stress from the get-go that I do not know Rishi Sunak. So far as I know, we’ve…

The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index rose 13 per cent last month to stand a third higher…

Publishers love books with ambitious subtitles such as ‘How Bubblegum Made the Modern World’, and this one’s, about American wheat…

In his 2005 book What The Dormouse Said John Markoff traced the roots of the personal computer industry to the…

For as long as we have been human we have looked for some way of telling when we are being…

Virginia Woolf admitted to her journal: ‘I haven’t that reality gift.’ Her contemporary Arnold Bennett had it in spades. He…

One thing that Covid lockdown made us appreciate was the importance of being outdoors. When we were finally allowed into…

First the bad news: Nina Stibbe’s new novel does not feature Lizzie Vogel, the engaging narrator of the trilogy that…

What particularly excites Silvia Ferrara, the author of The Greatest Invention, is not language per se but writing – that…

Just as one is inclined to believe Carlyle’s point that the history of the world is but the biography of…

In this arresting debut novel we follow 26-year-old Eve as she tries to come to terms with the loss of…

In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris,…

John Donne sounds like nobody else, and his poems invite us to feel that we might know him, says Daniel Swift

What a relief it was to see Parallel Mothers the new film by Pedro Almodóvar. There was the tediousness and…

A ‘Ghost Shop’ has appeared between Domino’s Pizza and Shoe Zone on Sunderland High Street. Look through the laminated window…

Operation Mincemeat is based on the book by Ben Macintyre, which in turn is based on what Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper…

Squaring up to the prospect of a new Red Hot Chili Peppers album, I’m reminded of a vintage quote by…

The only impersonation I can do is my Jimmy Savile impersonation. This is not uncommon among people of my generation:…

The Fever Syndrome is a dramatised lecture set in a New York brownstone occupied by the super-brainy Myers family. The…

Dan Hitchens on the beauty of gasholders

Music and politics don’t mix, runs the platitude. Looks a bit tattered now, doesn’t it? For Soviet musicians, of course,…

Is the woke tide finally starting to turn? One aspect of the mainstream media’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis might…

The word ‘fatigue’ has been part of the English language since at least 1693. It comes from a French source…

What makes a hot cross bun a hot cross bun? Is it in the bun: the spice, the dried fruit…

White to play. A variation from Esipenko-Nakamura, Fide Grand Prix Berlin 2022. Which move would allow White to force a…

The poem is ‘Rondeau’ by Leigh Hunt. Its first three words as quoted in ODQ are ‘JENNY KISSED ME’ (diagonally…

Unclued lights (including two of two words) suggest nine words (all in Chambers) starting with the same four-letter word that…

Q. A great friend is in a terrible state regarding a cat foisted on her by a close relation. She…

It’s fairly commonplace for people to wonder what, if anything, they’ll be remembered for. I’m going to be 59 later…

The bank was having Transgender Visibility Day when I popped in to deposit some cash.The stressed-looking customers, meanwhile, seemed mostly…

After north Cornwall I came to the Test Valley, I think. That is what it says on the council vans…

In Competition No. 3244, you were invited to submit a poem to mark St George’s Day that rivals in awfulness…

The only good news, after the massacres in Ukraine, is that so many ugly behemoth super-yachts have been seized and…

How wonderful after three years to have the crowds back to enjoy the glorious concoction of skill, bravery, razzmatazz and…

According to Pliny the Elder, Scipio Aemilianus was the first man to shave daily. The origin of the name Boeing…

Wesley So won the final Fide Grand Prix, which was held in Berlin earlier this month. But it was Hikaru…

To evade algorithms that hunt down forbidden words, users of platforms like TikTok employ cryptic synonyms. So deadbecomes unalive, and…

I went cycling in the Pyrenees with my teenagers last week. Every time we stopped for a break, out came…

The Irish rarely understate their achievements. Yet there is one exception. Over the centuries, the links between Catholic Ireland and…