The major problem facing the Labor party today is one of logistics: how do you get rid of a floundering…

Saving scientists, bureaucrats & the Great Barrier Reef Did you know that Christine Milne was Vice President of the International…

I have over the years passed up many an opportunity to hear Keysar Trad in the flesh. Publicist, poet, media…

My bladder is still fighting the NSW State Election. It is 5am and for the past six weeks this has…

In cases like that of Billy Gordon, give the voters the final say

Richie Benaud was master of all trades, jack of none

The current system of financing the states should be thrown overboard

Professor Anne Twomey (‘Royal activism in the spider web of secrecy’, 4 April) argues that Prince Charles’s use of his…

Professor Anne Twomey (‘Royal activism in the spider web of secrecy’, 4 April) argues that Prince Charles’s use of his…

Would-be leaders of the left are harnessing a mood of angry populism. It’s better as a way of getting elected than as an approach to government

The Democratic party has moved left under Obama. It’s not a look that suits the former first lady

That’s why its arguments are so impervious to evidence and reason

Want to be virtuous? Saying the right things violently on Twitter is much easier than real kindness

As Kingsley Amis said, no pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home

The artist, at 69, on Rembrandt, Twombly and talking to God

He’d be the first Jewish prime minister since Disraeli. So why is a swing-voting community overwhelmingly backing the Tories?

The things you can do in Møn – all of them

Cameron’s triumphant intervention in Libya has ended with death in the Mediterranean. This is why we need foreign policy to become an election issue

Home Launching the Conservative party manifesto, David Cameron, the party leader, told voters he wanted to ‘turn the good news…

Plus: Ed Miliband’s dangerous virtue, and a more enjoyable alternative to Adam Smith

Plus: What Viv Nicholson’s spending spree would cost today, and where the right to buy is used most

The Defence Secretary could — and should — have taken a lesson in rhetoric from ancient Athens

From ‘Some reflections of an alien enemy: the contradiction between being and feeling an Englishman, by a Czech’, The Spectator, 17…

Plus: Suits on the beach, hiring vicars and airline accidents

David Cameron may look ‘too posh to push’. In fact, friends say, he’s simply too worried about losing

I can’t stand the party’s mindset, leadership and many of its policies, but on one key issue I trust it more than the rest

In Scotland as in Catalonia, it is a shared sense of victimhood that is the strongest source of patriotism

The Fixed Term Parliaments Act has changed everything. No, wait, don’t go away…

Plus: Canvassing for election predictions on a delayed Ryanair flight

On the centenary of the Armenian genocide, Justin Marozzi is appalled by how this great catastrophe has been almost entirely buried, through neglect or denial, until now

In a review of Skyfaring, a memoir by Mark Vanhoenacker, Stephen Bayley overcomes his nervousness on the subject of flying and is entranced by a pilot’s poetic vision

Curating embraces everything these days — including sandwiches — says Jack Castle, and the superstar curators of exhibitions have become far more important than the artists themselves

M.J Carter’s The Infidel Stain, set in the dark alleys of Dickensian London, combines pornography and the Chartist movement in high Victorian melodrama

The perpetual dilemma of where to live is explored in Melissa Harrison’s vibrant novel of roots and belonging

Gyalo Thondup, brother of the Dalai Lama, recalls in detail his many years directing Tibet’s foreign policy. But can we believe him?, asks Jonathan Mirsky

We know a lot about Roman baths, says Peter Stothard, but not so much about their lavatories. Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow in The Archeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy has the subject comprehensively covered

James Wood, Michael Hoffmann and the state of modern literary criticism

In a review of Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child, Alex Clark finds shades of Emily Brontë in this novel about the erasure of female experience

George Steiner is a deeply erudite, elegant writer, with a profound knowledge of European culture. It’s a pity his latest essay, full of lovely disquisitions, lacks a single original argument

Magnus Mills’s novel The Field of the Cloth of Gold is certainly not about is Henry VIII. And what it is about doesn’t really matter. Just enjoy its pure word music

Vesna Goldsworthy’s novel about Moscow-on-Thames is a tense, witty page-turner, says Viv Groskop

Attica Locke’s smart legal thriller, Pleasantville, is set in an elegant suburb of Houston, specifically designed for middle-class blacks. But it’s still a ghetto — with very few exit points

The Master of Suspense was full of fear and paranoia himself, reveals Christopher Bray in a review of two lives of Alfred Hitchcock

This story, second in a projected series (the first was The Thief Fleet, reviewed in these pages 8 December 2012),…

Stephen Bayley hails the automobile - a miracle of technical and artistic collaboration - and mourns its demise

The Russian-born French artist emerges from her husband's shadows - and triumphs

Irrespective of his 'peace-making', the Israeli-Argentine is the greatest all-round musician in the world

Tansy Davies's score marks a real arrival for the British composer but ultimately the opera loses its way

Plus: split in half like the atom, Tom Morton-Smith's Oppenheimer  would have twice the force

But the pacing is dreary and the characters do not connect in this period drama about a gardening showdown at the court of Louis XIV

Also there's only one throat-slitting and one burning-at-the-stake, moans James Delingpole

Plus: two award-winning plays on the World Service that crackle with energy

The Mayor would like his cultural development of the Olympic site to emulate the mighty legacy of the Great Exhibition. But will it?

A baroque music festival in Hobart sounded right with particularly appropriate settings such as the Theatre Royal and the pretty…

Red brick tenements, gangsters and genuine working-class accents are a thing of the past in Manhattan

Oscar’s Easter day (eggs included)

Why do people turn perfectly adequate titles into meaningless jargon?

So much for all that expert advice on hibernation

As if a turtle you have laid your eggs in a bowl of sand. Unlike the turtle you sit next…

The Grand National wasn’t his grand finale - on to Sandown!

When I was growing up, the loudest, most explosive arguments erupted when my parents played bridge together. Not surprisingly, when…

The Hamilton Russell trophy for London clubs has been dominated in the past by the RAC. This year, though, they were…

White to play. This is from Lee-Zakharov, Vrnjacka Banja 1963. Black has just captured on c3 and now 1 Qxc3…

In Competition No. 2893 you were invited to suggest suitable Desert Island Discs for a historical figure, living or dead.…

In six answers the wordplay ignores an item. These items (two of them identical) are not listed as specific 27…

Five perimeter entries, and 29 and 30, are types of BODYGUARD. First prize Amanda Spielman, London SW4 Runners-up Dr S.M.…

My favourite bit is the chapter called ‘It does all add up’

This year: Richard Attenborough, Clarissa Dickson Wright, and a late appearance for opening batsman Bobby Moore

Plus: What to do when waiters call you ‘you guys’, and how to keep fellow students out of your beautiful room

I suspect this was not his primary motivation

And do they mean it in the Dear Deidre sense?