Well might the Treasurer Josh Frydenberg choke on his words in parliament when detailing the horrendous debt currently being imposed…

Turnbull: Adam Bandt in a better suit The problem with reviewing Malcolm Turnbull’s book is where to begin. How about…

Well done, Angus Six weeks ago I advised the prime minister to undertake a ministerial reshuffle. Three weeks ago I…

Two countries divided by a common pandemic In late 1970, British prime minister Ted Heath learnt that his Australian counterpart…

How Trump’s enemies corrupted the US legal process

Politics infects the search for a coronavirus cure

Did the New Zealand government act illegally on lockdown laws?

Has our larrikin identity succumbed to the scolding nanny?

Time to shift our attention to India

Banks’ coal ban environmentally irrelevant

The people never agreed to this naked power grab

The lockdown could have been the moment I was waiting for: a chance to make those long, slow recipes whose…

To my surprise, what I miss most about life before the lockdown are parties. As others pine for restaurants and…

The US-Saudi alliance is crumbling

The shift in Tory thinking on China

Another plague is stalking Africa

Has there ever been a better time to drive?

The global cost of lockdown

Lifting lockdown is a worldwide experiment

Jobs for all Sir: Charles Bazlington championed Universal Basic Income in last week’s magazine (Letters, 9 May). It is welcome…

Safety first The government was criticised for its new coronavirus slogan, ‘Stay alert’. What are the most common safety slogans…

The speed with which ‘model’ Nightingale hospitals have been designed and erected across the UK reminds one of the experts…

Entering my 54th day of quarantine, I recall how much I was looking forward to this spring in England. There…

Home The government changed its slogan from ‘Stay home, protect the NHS, save lives’ to ‘Stay alert, control the virus,…

It would be a tragedy if one of the legacies of Covid-19 — a disease which hardly affects children physically…

This month’s most significant corporate deal attracted less attention than it might have done in normal times, crowded out by…

A friend, a senior retired mandarin, emails. He complains that rural lockdown means that he and his wife have ‘got…

Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly…

Should our future permit an occupation so frivolous, historians years from now will make a big mistake if they blame…

I realised things were getting back to normal when I threw away a third of a tin of chopped tomatoes…

‘Covid-19 has been perhaps the biggest test of governments worldwide since the 1940s,’ declares the government’s command paper on the…

My research assistant, John Steele, is also a songwriter. A friend emailed him with the lyrics of a Fleetwood Mac…

With unlimited information just a click away, everyone can pass as a polymath today, says Philip Hensher

Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains…

One of the great mysteries of European history is how for the best part of 700 years a family who…

It’s the perfect opportunity to crack open those classics of 19th-century fiction you’ve always been meaning to read, and I…

Heteropoda davidbowie is a species of huntsman spider. Though rare, it has been found in parts of Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia…

Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue,…

Cinema history is a strange thing. A couple of months ago the Guardian began a series in which film critics…

At a well-reported political meeting at London’s Queen’s Hall during the first world war the preacher and suffragette Maude Royden…

One of the delights of going to stay with my grandparents in the 1970s was that my grandmother was a…

In the two generations since Watergate, the image of the journalist has gone from that of plucky truth-seeker to sensationalist…

On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman…

It was not until I went to Harvard in 1988 to take a year out from the Foreign Office that…

She lived in a flat in Kings Cross, was a lifelong socialist, a regularly observant Presbyterian, a Dame of the…

Sweden is now properly celebrated as the Land that Called Coronavirus Correctly. But in the distant past, those with long…

Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion, real name Bruce Frederick Cummings, earned his living measuring the legs of lice in the Natural…

The music of the Beastie Boys was entirely an expression of their personalities, a chance to delightedly splurge out on…

I am daunted. Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony is a work that I regard with love, awe and even anxiety. I always…

The National’s bizarre livestreaming service continues. On 7 May, for one week only, it released a modern-dress version of Antony…

The earliest depictions of the Americas were eye-popping, and shaped European art, says Laura Gascoigne

Here’s something that may interest you. Or not. (Could go either way.) I was looking over Sight & Sound’s ‘100…

Aronian–Vidit, Online Nations Cup, May 2020. Vidit has just captured axb3 en passant. Aronian’s next move revealed a powerful concept.…

Gstaad Hippocrates is known as the father of Western medicine and he discovered and named a disease known as ‘micropoulaki’…

France is divided into a red zone and a green zone. We’re green. Green for go. From this morning we…

If this lockdown doesn’t end soon we are all going to turn into hairy lefties. I have just cut the…

I have a new job, which is maintaining a website called Lockdown Sceptics (lockdownsceptics.org). It’s a compendium of evidence that…

Q. For me the hallmark of a really close friend is someone with whom you feel comfortable enough to bring…

I was once invited to the Cheltenham races and found the experience underwhelming. Everything was too respectable: not nearly Hibernian…

The thirteen unclued lights are all breads, hence the puzzle’s real title at 17A. First prizeNicholas Grogan, Purley, Surrey Runners-up…

My entertainment last week was watching the NN-Cup, a ‘Goulash’ tournament normally held in Moscow, now played online for the…

One of the few benefits to emerge from this pandemic is that the world’s population has been given a crash…

In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse…

In Competition No. 3148 you were asked to imagine what the result might have been had a well-known writer slipped…

Unclued lights (including one of two words) suggest a section of a sequence whose final member will appear in the…

Fifty years ago, the USSR faced a ‘Rest of the World’ team in a match in Belgrade, with the likes…

There is racing elsewhere in the world. It restarted in France on Monday, la course de chevaux being classed in…