There is much to look forward to, and indeed much to be grateful for, as we embark upon the adventure…

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in Sydney the other day was an entirely different bouilloire de poissons from the presentation…

One of the enduring benefits of emigrating at an early age is that you are not expected to attend school…

The Paris climate conference venue is a sight to behold. Over 40,000 people crowd into the temporary venue created using…

I feel I have lost part of myself with the death of Harry Butler at the age of 85. Though…

Architect Amanda Levete brings a feline elegance to Melbourne’s MPavilion

My predictions for 2016

The Labour candidate is fighting the mayoral battle his way, but he’s still very much on the left

The Tory mayoral contender explains how he plans to sell himself to a city that’s now solidly Labour

Respect has dwindled, his mayoral campaign has failed to catch fire, and several groups of investigators are circling…

Britain seems to be suffering from a dearth of lightheartedness

You can see the legacy of the Celtic Tiger years, in good roads and boarded-up shops, but something different is now abroad

How do you know if a charity is changing lives? The government clearly has no idea

Let’s get rid of these ridiculous thimble-sized offerings

Peter Oborne’s letter from Libya

This is the most compelling wildlife destination on Earth

The city’s mood right now is enough to make Julie Burchill love the French

There are an increasing number of reasons, even if the sheikh doesn’t buy all the books himself this time

It’s cheaper than Chiantishire, and the touristy bits are touristy in an authentically Italian way

Welcome to the land of Elvis, Faulkner and the blues trail

These rocky islands are an unexpectedly delightful place to visit, says Camilla Swift

Seferis’s line about his native Greece, ‘Our country is a closed in place, all mountains’, haunted my mind as I…

A fraction of the money we spend subsidising green energy could keep our homes truly safe from flooding

Home Thousands of houses were flooded in York, Leeds, Manchester and other parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, after weeks of…

Also: my Muslim friends’ radicalisation worries; facts about Proust’s Paris; a Parisian dentist in London

Plus: 2015 in numbers; cities of terror and murder; the origins of the caucus

Plato’s Republic and Baroness Butler-Sloss’s think-tank report

From ‘The Military Situation’, The Spectator, 1 January 1916: The opening of a new year is a time for taking stock…

Mind altering Sir: I was quite surprised to find the spread of mind altering drugs had reached Wandandian NSW but…

Just because they might wish a shape to be a circle, that does not make it so

And almost everything bad is the result of utopians trying to plan the world into a better state

The human element: highs, lows and loose ends of 2015

There are plenty of good stories about the legendary New Yorker in its heyday, but sadly Thomas Vinciguerra is no storyteller

In The Prose Factory D.J. Taylor describes the precarious life of the English man of letters over the past century

Pryce-Jones’s memoir, Fault Lines, depicts an unhappy, complex family riven by snobbishness and materialism

Laura Cumming, on the trail of a missing masterpiece, pours heart and soul into a thrilling detective story

Mallory Ortberg hilariously imagines how some of the greatest fictional characters would have texted today

The brutal murder by the IRA of the courageous Grenadier Guards officer who took one risk too many is given the fullest treatment yet in Alistair Kerr’s Betrayal

Robin Lane Fox has made an intense study of a critical decade in St Augustine’s life when he produced his most famous book — ‘like no other, before or since’

Horatio Clare travels far and wide in the hope of glimpsing the world’s rarest bird but finds only some eccentric birders attempting to do the same

Martin Gayford recommends the exhibitions to visit - and to avoid - over the coming year

The 1516 classic - which is celebrating its 500th anniversary at Somerset House - is a textbook for our troubled times (once you get past the proto-socialist polemic)

Plus: a beautiful, elegant play at the Young Vic with a brutal denouement

The 16th century composer wrote some of the most alluring music ever written. But his psychopathic biography always overshadows this

It looks nice but is dull, repetitive and lacking in insight — and I wanted to punch Eddie Redmayne

Ads aside, Radiolab’s podcast about American ice-cream wars had Kate Chisholm hooked - as did Radio 4’s Truth Be Told podcast about what it’s like to have a Caesarean

Plus: in Billionaire Boy, David Walliams seems to have learned that childish humour is at its winning best when it’s aimed at children

It may be the best thing to come out of Belgium after chocolates. Or even the only good thing after…

The time has come for governments to step in — and for me to say that something must be really wrong

It was one tablet after another — legal and illegal

2016 was to be the year of no more principled stands, but that was before I got wind of London’s first toilets for the socially excluded

His spirit of optimism is a powerful impetus to good cheer as a new year begins

This might be the most beautiful hand I’ve ever seen. I came across it while reading one of the old…

As the new year begins, I pay a final tribute to the city financier Jim Slater, who did so much to…

Black to play. This position is from Wright-Keene, Slater Tournament, Southend 1968. Black’s next move destroyed the white kingside and…

In Competition No. 2928 you were invited to submit a thank-you letter for a particularly unenjoyable Christmas visit to relatives…

The unclued lights, (two of two words), individually or as two pairs, are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer 19th…

The unclued lights include the words ONE to NINE which had to be entered as figures 1 to 9 in…

My dream of growing veg around the corner is fading, but there’s a fight still on

Take parking in central London. I wouldn’t do it more than once or twice a year

Also: a new way to communicate with the hard of hearing

Three fine memories discussed over even finer wines

Misattribution is more common – and sometimes riskier – than you might think