The Liberal party is adrift, a large, ugly and ungainly tanker that has slipped its moorings and is taking on…

Whitlam’s revenge It is often said that the Whitlam government was in office but not in power. Can the same…

Upholding the truth in a time of universal deceit Australia’s disproportionate March 2020 response to the Covid pandemic has morphed…

Governments’ scary behaviour

Equity is merely Marx without the beard

We have fallen for a classic trick

Say goodbye to the lucky country

As an economist, I can no longer read the Economist

Is it time to call it quits on our federation?

Health minister endorses doctors’ right to treat Covid

NSW under dictatorship As the dictatorship was intensified over New South Wales, the provisions of new decrees were announced as…

In the post-pandemic economy, workers have the upper hand

This slick new tournament will ruin cricket

Not since September 1642, when a mob of Parliamentary soldiers opened fire on the sculpture of the Virgin Mary carved…

Lobsters like to live in gullies on the sea floor, or under sand, and I understand how they feel. But…

Havana There is an astonishing patience in the Cuban people, born of endless waiting. When a store has, say, chicken,…

  Dante’s Beach, Ravenna My fiery Italian wife Carla is not just a passionate patriot but also a devout Catholic, and…

Professional kitchens have always seemed like pressure cookers: hot, sweaty, stressful. The caricature of a head chef is angry, sweary,…

Has Covid killed the PM’s liberalism?

The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee pageant was officially launched last week, with a splashy press call in the Raphael Court of…

Home England expects everyone to wear masks in crowded places, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said in a televised address,…

Save the parish Sir: The Revd Marcus Walker eloquently describes the crisis that has taken hold in the Church of…

Space cadets Richard Branson joined a test flight on his Virgin Galactic craft to the edge of space, to promote…

The Prime Minister is urging citizens not to throw caution to the winds when lockdown ends on 19 July but…

There are two certainties whenever England’s football team plays; one that is long-established and the other a recent phenomenon. Players…

Have you been scanning airline websites for exotic destinations to which your double-jabbed status might allow you to slip away…

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is planning to install a statue of John Chilembwe in Trafalgar Square. Mr Chilembwe…

Having indulged an unhealthy interest in human migration for decades, I’ve been intrigued by how the number of illegal immigrants…

A special animus is aimed at Priti Patel, perhaps because the combination of being Indian, female and firmly Tory is…

‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won,’ wrote the Duke of Wellington after…

Before plunging into a vexed question, it’s sometimes wise to point out that one is aware how vexed it is.…

Adam Nicolson is one of our finest writers of non-fiction. He has range — from place and history to literature…

Lord Macaulay wrote that ‘during the century and a half which followed the Conquest there is, to speak strictly, no…

No one ever raised a statue to a translator, disgruntled adepts of that art sometimes complain. I beg to differ,…

When Caroline Sheridan married George Chapple Norton in 1827 she ceased to exist. According to the legal status quo, as…

Manchester, in the words of the artist Linder Sterling, is a ‘tiny little world’. Nearly three million people live in…

Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry…

Tom Miller describes how Xinjiang became a laboratory for China’s mass surveillance system – built with the help of US tech companies

The late Derek Ratcliffe, arguably Britain’s greatest naturalist since Charles Darwin, once explained how he cultivated a technique for finding…

Just as the lockdown imprisons the people of Sydney those in Canberra have had the chance to see that exhilaration…

Lockdown must be making me irritable; an article during the week really got me going. It concerns two forthcoming productions…

To its huge credit, ITV has managed to find perhaps the last two television celebrities who’ve never before been filmed…

Claudia Massie on the unjustly neglected artist Joan Eardley, who deserves to be ranked alongside Auerbach, Bacon and de Kooning

Black Widow is the latest Marvel film and although I’d sworn off these films a while ago, due to sheer…

What shall we destroy next? Romeo & Julietseems a promising target and the Globe has set out to vandalise Shakespeare’s…

Pity the aesthete, the flâneur and the opera-goer. Those who find the contents of their own heads so dull and…

What would a rock band have to do now to be seen as heralding the future? Twenty years ago, it…

Tanjil Rashid on the vivid memory-scapes of Hong Kong master Wong Kar Wai

Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste,…

When I switched on my TV last Sunday I was not at all surprised to see a three-star Australian general…

‘Gain of function’ is a chilling new expression—well, new to most of us—that has entered our language as a result…

In his autobiographical book Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! the late American physicist Richard Feynman described how he amused himself…

Unclued lights (including three of two words and two pairs) suggest various versions of a name given by a pair…

White to play and mate in two. Composed by Sam Loyd, Sunny South, 1885. Nearly all Black’s legal moves can…

In Competition No. 3207, you were invited to supply an extract from a thriller, written by a well-known politician, that…

I failed a moral test last weekend. A friend offered me a free ticket to the Euro 2020 final and…

Q. I have been double-vaccinated but am especially at risk and, since I know of at least four double-vaccinated people…

CHERRY, NETTLE, SMOKE, PLUM-PUDDING, BEES, EGG, SUNBEAM and WIND are the perimetric answers to riddles posed by NUTKIN in The…

Sometimes the opposite of a good idea is, as Niels Bohr said, another good idea. But the converse is also…

‘Ping, ping, ping went the bell,’ sang my husband, making his eyes wide and jigging in his best imitation of…

If someone had told me in February 2020 that virtually the whole world would be going into lockdown for well…

Where the 36th (Ulster) Division attacked at 7.30 a.m. on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme in…

Since telling the shoot we won’t let them use the land we rent, we have been beset by a series…

Some time ago, I wrote that rosé should only be drunk south of Lyon, but one could start on the…

I write this as a follow-up to last week’s essay on muzzling after making whoopee. I’m on my way to…