There was much hysteria this week over the news that former prime minister Scott Morrison had secretly sworn himself in…

Good news on the Great Barrier Reef challenges climate ‘science’

India’s strategically significant coal warning

China fesses up

India turns 75

Pandemic lies

The FBI raid on Trump diminishes America

Angus Houston’s responses to MH370 raise questions about his fitness to review our defences

Conflicts of interest at the heart of the Ardern government

If the US falls, so do we

When I was in my twenties, exactly 50 Edinburgh Festivals ago, Frank Dunlop directed the first professional production of Joseph…

Might cryptocurrencies stage a return?

My holiday from the news

The hidden harms in the Online Safety Bill

Giorgia Meloni is favourite to be Italy’s next prime minister. What does she really believe?

The General Medical Council has lost the trust of doctors

The general flying advice this year, with airports resembling cattle markets and when you can’t be sure if you’re ever…

Home The annual rate of inflation rose to 10.1 per cent, its highest since 1982. Average wages rose by 4.7…

No competition Sir: Ross Clark’s compelling critique of the water companies comes to the wrong conclusion (‘Water isn’t working’, 13…

Testing, testing When were A levels first sat? They can be traced back to the Oxford Local, an external examination…

As Miss Truss and Mr Sunak spray policies around on a range of topics which they hope will appeal to…

It has become received wisdom that Brexit has condemned Britain to chronic labour shortages. Many of the migrant workers who…

I love Suffolk, not just for its beauty but for the stories to be found all around me. Every day…

How outraged should we be that Saudi Aramco has reported a world-record quarterly profit of $48 billion, representing a giant…

This is a bleak version of looking on the bright side, but what’s astonishing about last week’s vicious stabbing in…

‘Whatever else you do, don’t step backwards,’ a man in the crowd shouts to Rishi Sunak as he stands on…

I do not doubt that hot weather occasioned by climate change is the primary cause of the many wildfires we…

It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the…

I have never had much time for Aleister Crowley. Magic(k) is nonsense; the mystical societies he founded were simply pretexts…

Cosy crime was once the literary world’s guilty secret, a refuge for any reader seeking entirely unchallenging entertainment – like…

Yuri Felsen, born in St Petersburg, was an exile in Riga, Berlin and Paris and died at Auschwitz in 1943.…

As Tory writers reflected on the safe passage of the Stuart dynasty through the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, an anonymous…

For two and a half years, as Britain adjusted from normality to the most disorienting collective trauma of our lifetimes,…

It’s hard (if not impossible) to imagine a world worth living in that doesn’t include the Marx Brothers; and equally…

Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…

Long Shadows, a powerful novel set mainly in the American civil war, is very unlike Gone with the Wind. The…

On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a…

Feelings of dislocation are at the heart of Amit Chaudhuri’s award-winning novels. Friend of My Youth (2017) followed a writer’s…

The Scottish writer David Keenan has published five novels in five years: This is Memorial Device (2017), For the Good…

Barney Norris’s third novel opens with a wedding in April. The couple tying the knot don’t matter; it’s the occasion…

Nothing is certain in a country where the past is constantly rewritten, says Owen Matthews

It’s a marvellous thing that the great Indian conductor Zubin Mehta will be wielding the baton for that illustrious group…

If you want real acting in films, forget the leads – it’s in the supporting roles that you’ll find true talent, says Tanya Gold

Philip Guston is hard to dislike. The most damning critique levied against the canonical mid-century American painter is that he…

‘Diversity is woven into the very soul of the story.’ If those words of praise from a rave review in…

In a new hour-long monologue, Burn, Alan Cumming examines the life and work of Robert Burns. The biographical material is…

My Old School is a documentary exploring a true story that would have to be true as it’s too preposterous…

The first part of the adventure was getting there. Out of the subway, past the tower blocks and under the…

‘Human beings are in trouble these days,’ says Herbie Hancock, chatting to us between songs. ‘And do you know who…

‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man? complains Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, a musical whose title…

British journalist Richard Godwin has alerted me to what may be the trendiest word of the moment: ‘namecore’. This is…

One of the joys of writing about old-fashioned food is coming across dishes that are new to me, and turn…

Coronis I suppose there’s always a first time, and looking back it was bound to happen. I scrambled off a…

An isolated Provençal stone farmhouse from the outside; from the inside a comfortable English country house. Sunk into the garriguea…

My husband is a writer (John Preston), whose recent books were better received than he had ever dared hope. When…

Round the grid from 1 runs a quotation (1,3,4.2,5,3,5,3,2,6) from a play followed by the dramatist’s name (two words). Two…

Everyone remembers their first Olympiad. As I boarded the flight to Chennai last month, it struck me that two full…

Black to play. A variation from McShane-Hamitevici, Chennai 2022. I avoided this position, but lost in a different way. White…

In Competition No. 3262, you were invited to submit a poem on behalf of Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss in…

30 July is Independence Day in Vanuatu in MELANESIA (23D). Its capital city is PORT VILA (39/16), one of its…

I don’t miss too many from the political world I once inhabited but I was saddened by the death of…

From the veranda of a small Irish farmhouse, I looked out over the sun-drenched West Cork peninsula. All I could…

Q. Some older American friends take me and my husband out to dinner once a year when they are over…

As a defender of free speech, I’m used to taking up the cudgels on behalf of unsavoury people. To quote…

The problem with attempts to make everything in life more scientific is that reality hates generalisation. You can try to…

Someone in the Guardian wrote that Boris Johnson had his ‘out of office’ on, and the Chancellor was ‘missing in…

Even in recent heat, the English summer can be magical. As long as there is shade, a pool and a…