Soon it will be raining barbequed chook in Port Augusta, thanks to the latest madcap scheme by the Turnbull and…

On Noel and Richo Last week in the Australian Noel Pearson wrote a piece responding to Graham Richardson’s earlier claim…

You might think that with the nation mesmerised by the proposal to legalise marriage between consenting New Zealand sheep farmers,…

LGBTI marriage is not a right. LGBTI marriage is not a right, but freedom of religion, or freedom to disagree…

There is one thing Brexit negotiators must fix if Britain really intends to rediscover its Commonwealth. For the last 44…

People no longer know how to use restaurants. Maybe they’ve lost the knack. Is it because Australians can’t afford to…

Recently I attended the Centre for Policy Studies’ Margaret Thatcher Conference on Security 2017 at the august Guildhall in the…

Dateline anywhere in Australia, three or four years from now. Spring is around the corner and love is in the…

In the 1950s a childless couple in the deserts of California set about creating their own family. Calvin and Ruby…

Big Brother is now stage centre in American political life. The recent appearance in the Washington Post of the transcript…

Say Yes to No Just as the appeasement of Nazi Germany ended with Chamberlain’s Declaration of War at 11.15am on…

In the midst of all the outrage about modern-day slavery, usually vulnerable men forced into manual labour, there is actually…

A vast cohort of bright young things have secured their university places with A-level success this week. But things are…

 Washington DC The National Enquirer presented Trump watchers with a mystery last week. Why did it print an attack on…

The subtitle of Al Gore’s new film is ‘Truth to Power’, which is supposed to give the impression of brave…

As his obituaries pointed out, my brother David made a name for himself with his unrideable bicycle; his ‘perpetual motion’…

Setting off to spend a year teaching English in Zhejiang province in south-eastern China, I expected plenty of surprises. But…

Chaps, be honest. Have you achieved nether-region nirvana? Twenty years ago I had reached the summit of underwear style and…

Foreign head of state Sir: Neil Brown does a Tony Abbott and conflates republicanism with every socialist cause he can…

Long before student activists started talking about pulling down statues of Cecil Rhodes, a cultural war was being waged in…

To the Business School at the University of Edinburgh to be interviewed on the theme of ‘Great Political Disasters’. Main…

Home Regulated rail fares will rise by 3.6 per cent in January, bringing the price of annual tickets from Oxford,…

All along Harley Street, charlatans and medical experts have set up side by side with no obvious way to tell…

I can’t work up much indignation at the collapse of London’s Garden Bridge project, which has been strangled by the…

When a new MP is offered a job as a parliamentary private secretary for a cabinet member, it’s often a…

People who feel unkindly disposed towards economic migrants are chemically imbalanced, according to a study from the University of Bonn.…

Friends arrived last week to find me in a mudhole, inside a cave-like tunnel into the hill, fiddling around with…

Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan —…

Writing of his grandmother’s cremation, Kushanava Choudhury reflects in The Epic City that, while his expatriate Indian cousins are separated…

Martin Amis once said that the writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety. While one part of your brain…

You can never completely leave a religious cult, as this strange and touching memoir demonstrates. Patterns of thinking, turns of…

Here is the opening sentence of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s meditation on beds.: With its four legs and its flat, soft…

Until the mid-1960s many historians believed witchcraft was a pre-Christian pagan fertility ritual, witches worshipping the Horned God, whose consort…

He’s not what you’d call prolific, Bernard MacLaverty. Midwinter Break is his fifth novel in 40 years, and his first…

‘New York stories in a way are always real estate stories,’ says the journalist Alan Light in Lizzy Goodman’s bustling…

Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…

Operas are subject to changes in fashion, suffering long periods of neglect. One such opera is Thaïs by Jules Massenet.…

Back in the period-instrument wars of the 1980s and ’90s, when the forces of historically informed performance smashed out of…

Not really a vintage Mariinsky season — an odd choice of repertoire and some hit-and-miss male casting — but the…

Brexit the Musical is a peppy satire written by Chris Bryant (not the MP, he’s a lawyer). Musically the show…

In 1987, the art of opera changed decisively. John Adams’s opera Nixon in China was so unlike the usual run…

One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered…

In Competition No. 3011 you were invited to submit a disgustingly flattering poem in heroic couplets in praise of a…

Q. Mary, I am what you would probably call a Sloane Ranger. I have great numbers of close friends and…

No, hang on, don’t turn to Dear Mary yet. This is not as dull as it sounds. It’s just that…

‘Racing isn’t a team sport,’ the diehards used to tell us about the Shergar Cup, Ascot’s annual contest for three-rider…

When BRIDGE is added to the unclued Across lights and FORD to the unclued Down lights (including each of the…

I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was…

As Jacob Rees-Mogg said in a different context, a happy birthday at my age is a terminological inexactitude. I needed…

Easier by far to load up my horses and move them to the next village than try to fight the…

Football’s back, I’m afraid, and, in the imperishable words of David Mitchell, every kick in every game matters to someone,…

The first weekend of August saw two big pairs tournaments, one in Oslo and one in Eastbourne, with remarkable similarities:…

A new book on the ingenious Hungarian master Gyula Breyer ranks, in my opinion, at the very top of chess…

White to play. This is from Breyer-Esser, Budapest 1917. White has a multiplicity of tempting options but the best move…

On Sunday morning we went, Oscar and I, to a vide grenier in the ancient, picturesque Provençal village. Vide grenier…

For years, Caroline and I have been squabbling over where to spend our summer holidays. Her ideal is a family-friendly…