And so it came to pass that a prophet arose from the banks of the Hudson River, a baby born…

B1 blasts off

Bob Hawke got it badly wrong

China is on track to rule the world’s energy

Consensus is not the answer

On Wong and Albanese trying to take credit for peace in the Middle East

Can we really trust Qatar?

All they are saying is give war a chance

Turnbull’s muddy bottomless hole

Albanese should be nailed for shirking on defence

As a foster carer and adopter, I’ve spent more mornings than I care to count coaxing my 13-year-old daughter into…

It is 35 years since I was last in Warsaw and the city is unrecognisable. Back then it was grimy…

Who is responsible for Labour’s recent woes? For some Conservatives, the answer is obvious – Sheridan Westlake. He is that…

On 3 July a Chinese man, Xu Zewei, was arrested in Milan to face extradition on nine charges relating to…

We live in a strange era in which much of our day-to-day experience is constructed for us digitally on a…

I arrived in Paris as an au pair in 2022. I was in my early twenties and armed only with…

This year has been a bad one for wildfires in Britain. In June, nearly 30,000 acres burned near Carrbridge in…

As Donald J. Trump flew to the Holy Land on Sunday to declare peace, his Vice-President took to the airwaves…

Call me disgusting, but I like rubbish, and I like it best from a skip. I am also in good…

King’s speechless There will be no state opening of parliament this year and consequently no King’s speech. This is only…

Exactly a year ago, this magazine warned that ministers were showing a dangerous naivety towards China. We revealed that the…

Since the UN does not provide a definition of the ‘just war’, it is interesting to see the ancient take…

Given the way the world is right now, I am avoiding it in the main. For the sake of my…

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, praised President Donald Trump for the Gaza ceasefire agreement while in India accompanied…

Rough justice Sir: The Church Commissioners’ plan to establish a £100 million (rising to £1 billion) fund for ‘reparative justice’…

Who knows what Rachel Reeves reads in bed. Perhaps she dips into her own debut book, The Women Who Made…

Poor old Hamas, losing all those dead Jews. The BBC reports that Hamas ‘could not locate the remaining hostages’ bodies’,…

It is more than nine years since I was suspended by the Labour party for – I think – a…

A personal note this week, as 15 October 2025 marked an occasion of sorts: when my husband’s and my Portuguese…

Researchers from Imperial College London this week released an analysis of the health of voters in the UK. In a…

The brilliant but unknowable songwriter is short-changed by this curious hybrid of slangy fangirl excitement and veneer of scholarship

The elusive novelist’s latest starts off complicated and then rapidly gets more so with its knot of gangsters, thugs, wacky inventors, spies, cops, political operatives and their accomplices

An impressively detailed chronicle by an analyst well up to the task. Read it and weep

A high-powered childless fortysomething social media exec’s life is turned upside down by the arrival of her 11-year-old niece

An admirably brief critical biography of Jean Baudrillard, whose prose was to thought what mud is to a windscreen

A meticulous account masquerading as adventure story of the life of the baker’s son from Kent who became a brilliant military tactician and soldier pivotal in the struggle against slavery and imperialism

In 1949, aged 26, Judy Montagu, cousin of Mary Churchill and daughter of Venetia Stanley, criss-crossed the US in a Greyhound bus. The resulting diary is edited and annotated by her daughter, whose mother died when she was only nine

Two AI aficionados sound the alarm in this blend of third-rate sci-fi, low-grade tech analysis and bad geopolitical assessment

The celebrated postwar film actor Klaus Kinski returned to the stage in 1971 to perform a monologue, footage of which has long fascinated the author of this experimental and distinguished novel

Everyone who has read the work of the late great Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian novelist forever spitting his fellow Austrians…

Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe is a biographical portrait of an emotionally damaged mother struggling with romantic and family problems.…

Is there anything menopausal women can’t do (on television)? Last Sunday, as a couple of them were still working on…

Ballad of a Small Player opens with Lord Doyle, played by Colin Farrell, hiding from security in his trashed casino…

Before Simply Red came on stage at the Greenwich peninsula’s enormodome, the screens showed a clip of a very young…

Here’s a patriotic thought for you: baroque opera, as we now know it, was made in Britain. Sure, there are…

When Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library wrote to John le Carré asking if the writer would leave it his…

Waldemar Januszczak and Bendor Grosvenor’s art podcast has returned after nearly five years. It is, says Januszczak, ‘the podcast they…

At the receptionist’s desk in Cosprop’s studio and costume warehouse, a former Kwik Fit garage, the sloping bleakness of Holloway…

It’s not often you can say, ‘I know exactly how he feels’ about your Prime Minister. But in following the…

Cheryl asks me to explain why we call someone who is off their rocker ‘dotty’. Well, ‘dotty’ has had that…

We were drinking Israeli wine as the talk ranged from frivolity to seriousness: from Donald Trump to the tragic paradoxes…

I am a proud father. Both my daughters got good degrees. But better still, they smoke, go to pubs and…

For Competition 3421 you were invited to submit a reply from Slough to offset Betjeman’s rude lines on the subject.…

My theory is that sachertorte is a victim of its own success. Over the past 150 years, it has become…

It’s hard work being rich. I gave up trying years ago. You must waste money on everything, even the basics,…

Q. My son’s new girlfriend is really sweet but my husband and I find it annoying how she puts her…

An email popped into my House of Lords inbox last week from Lt Gen. Richard Nugee with the subject line…

‘Data-free vegans incoming by taxi,’ I texted the builder boyfriend, to alert him to the possibility of triple trouble. Quadruple…