As the two sides of politics marshal their forces and prepare to do battle in polling booths across the nation…

The liberty that dare not speak its name Lord Alfred Douglas, young lover of the great Oscar Wilde, wrote a…

Dissent is a defining attribute of democracy, not a threat to it

Our nuclear energy ban means there is no prospect of net zero

Net Zero was a huge mistake

The insiders versus the outsiders

Fear and loathing in a tale of two Canberra crimes

And what you didn’t know about US elections

There are none so blind as today’s ‘academics’

The fake republican movement has a grim history

Is Putin playing with the western press?

Fond memories of the great satirist

How Putin bewilders the West

The growing bond between Moscow and Beijing

The psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer on how to stay ahead of the algorithms

Medics need black humour

The rise of lesbian divorce

Is Moscow’s bluff backfiring?

There was, at least until recently, an old sign round the back of the Savoy banning whistling by staff or…

German archaeologists have found ancient Egyptian tablets covered in repetitive writing exercises and ask — were they pupil punishments? But…

Prince Andrew’s decision to settle his case with Virginia Giuffre means he will be spared the potentially humiliating ordeal of…

Facing the music Police in New Zealand played Barry Manilow records to truck drivers in an attempt to persuade them…

A health-care disaster Sir: Kate Andrews’s piece on who really controls the NHS (‘Waiting game’, 12 February) gives us a…

Foreign trips can offer a sense of perspective. Heading to Saudi Arabia, I prepare for my first stint of diplomacy.…

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, made ready for a Russian invasion of Ukraine by cutting short a planned visit…

When Sir Tony Brenton writes a letter to the Times, as he frequently does, it always says at the bottom…

Boris Johnson has a lot of people to thank for his survival in 10 Downing Street, but Keir Starmer should…

One of the few things I have learned in this life is that Dante Alighieri was wrong. In the Inferno…

You have the advantage over me. It may be that you are reading this now in your makeshift fallout shelter,…

‘Never interrupt your enemy,’ said Napoleon, ‘when he is making a mistake.’ A Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine would…

I’ve had the opportunity recently to take part in wage-rise discussions for several small entities in which I’m involved. The…

OK, I finally watched Netflix’s Don’t Look Up. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it — especially before its effective subtitle for us…

David Abulafia admires the shrewdness, generosity and panache of the Sassoons over many generations

The Normans had an astonishingly good run. Not only did they take over England in 1066, of course, but they…

The journalist and broadcaster Christina Patterson’s memoir begins promisingly. She has a talent for vivid visual description, not least: ‘We…

Demographers are attached to their theories. The field’s most enduring is the ‘demographic transition’, whereby modernisation inexorably lowers a society’s…

The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative…

The 20th century was an amazing time for Russian pianists, and the worse things got, politically and militarily, the more…

Chesterton said – and the poet Peter Porter loved to repeat – that if a thing was worth doing it…

Charlie Chaplin is one of the most famous movie stars ever and is certainly the most famous movie star with…

Never Not Once has a cold and forbidding title but it starts as an amusing tale set in an LA…

We gathered on a freezing Sunday night, inside a barrel-vaulted church designed in the 1890s by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to…

Grade: A+ It is not true, fellow boomers, that there is nothing new under the sun nor no good new…

London felt like its old self on Friday night. Possibly it was just me; when you visit the capital once…

Louise Bourgeois was 62 and recently widowed when she first used soft materials in her installation ‘The Destruction of the…

Jack Reacher is back on the screen and aficionados of the hugely successful Lee Child airport thrillers in which he…

Christopher Howse is bowled over by the astonishingartefacts in the British Museum’s Stonehenge exhibition

Tyler Cowen is a man who leaves you at once in awe and perturbed. He is the Holbert L. Harris…

If a week is a long time in politics, two months is a geological epoch, during which not just goalposts…

Writing in the Daily Telegraph James Morrow referred to something called a preference cascade which he said was a term…

I was a bit irritated by all the millennials saying the Superbowl half-time show made them feel old. The 15-minute…

In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4…

Across oceans and continents, less favoured nations produce more history than they can consume. In these islands, the English —…

‘The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be…

Q. As if it wasn’t bad enough to overhear one side of a conversation as it’s bellowed into a mobile…

Cooking for romance is no laughing matter. The stakes are high. Get it right and woo the love of your…

In Competition No. 3236, you were invited to submit a poem that begins ‘Oh my love is like…’ . From…

Black to play. Shuvalova–Pavlidou, Women’s World Blitz Championship, 2021. White was winning, but has just played 89 g3-g4? No resignation…

Unclued lights form a progressive set, plus the name of the speaker.   Across 1 Talk shortly about present-day veg…

Early on St Valentines Day I walked down to the car park where the raindrops were knocking off the young…

Certain sections of the media love to run a knocking story and when champion trainer Paul Nicholls’s horses failed to…

‘Do you have any questions?’ said the man at the insurance company after an hour of me trying to take…

Contemplating a lost position is a bit like having sauce down your shirt. It is annoying in itself, but worse,…

Gstaad I cross-country ski the old-fashioned way, not skating but on machine-made narrow tracks. It is known to be the…

A couple of weeks ago, just as I’d begun to think that if I hadn’t got Covid by now I…

Unclued lights (PLAY, WITH, HOLD, DOWN) comprise components for the unclued cyclic sequence PLAY WITH, WITHHOLD, HOLD DOWN and DOWNPLAY.…