February seems a long time ago. It’s not only the seasons that have changed, so too has the entire political…

It was back in the mists of time but I easily recall the day in September 1961 when I dropped…

Waking from Menzies’ home-owning dream

Talking politics in Central Asia is often unwise, so I try to bring it up casually. ‘Oh you won’t believe…

Like Oscar Wilde’s demand that ‘the man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one’…

The intertwined nature of business, media and politics built the corrupt edifice of WA Inc

The Left have discovered a new tool in their armoury - mental health

Far from being settled, the science of Climate Change is mired in miscalculations, misinformation and uncertainty.

With 50,000 boat people in just six months, and more to come, the politics of asylum here is becoming increasingly toxic

The bid to ban men from seeing The Gift of Fire sets a very dangerous precedent indeed

The former health secretary’s shift to the left wasn’t a purely cynical move; it’s more personal than that

His life-saving invention has always been designed to drive out cigarettes. Why can’t public health panjandrums see that?

True, I’ve not turned on a radiator for two years – but in spring and summer it’s miserably, and sometimes dangerously, hot

It’s the fear that makes them so fascinating. If conservationists accepted that, they’d have a better chance of saving them

The English approach to opera and the open air betrays our national discomfort with the art form

Leaving the euro will be scary, but it’s the only chance of making a full recovery

Home Talha Asmal, aged 17, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, died in a suicide bomb attack on forces near an oil…

Plus: Asperger’s, empathy and my son; and the American way of death

Plus: The worst place to spend Ramadan, Brummie call centres and American ethnicities

The great philosopher wasn’t one to overlook the apparently trivial; but he didn’t share our sentimentality about childhood

From ‘Literature and Soldiers’, The Spectator, 19 June 1915: In this war some of the most moving poetry has been written…

Plus: Peter Hitchens and Alasdair Lexden on David Cameron, and a new theory on Dear Mary’s buttons

By not staying on as caretaker leader, he has ensured his party plots its course in panic and ignorance

Plus: the Magna Carta’s overlooked first clause; and how I fought bravely at Waterloo

Life has changed in Dewsbury and Bradford. We've let people there down – but not in the way the bien pensants tell you

I can feel sorry for those who are pursued as I pursued poor Mr W. But I can't accept their self-justifications

I thought he’d just been lobbied heavily. Now it’s starting to look worse than that

Plus: Why HSBC is wrong to contemplate bringing back the Midland

Are the French really natural-born philosophers? Sudhir Hazareesingh’s portrait in How The French Think is affectionate, familiar and fondly teasing

In The Tsarnaev Brothers Masha Gessen tells the alarming story of a family who didn’t belong anywhere  — but were determined to make their mark

Whether dutiful, chivalrous, flamboyant or just plain quarrelsome John Leigh’s literary duellists make engaging subjects in Touché.

The Festival of Insignificance, Milan Kundera’s first novel in a decade, is short, defiantly self-conscious — and fatally lacking in enjoyment

Stand-up comedian Aziz Ansari reveals some very unromantic modern mating practices in Modern Romance

Instrumental is an unflinching misery memoir about abuse from early childhood — but James Rhodes’s anger seems equally directed at himself

Talleyrand should not have sneered at the Austrian regiments — they actually won a surprising number of battles, as Richard Bassett’s For God and Kaiser shows

Sinclair is one of our finest writers, says Michael Moorcock, and London Overground is one vast, pumping, blaring, rattling, melancholy, celebratory cultural circus

Hugh Aldersey-Williams ‘wrenches’ the brilliant 17th-century polymath into the 21st century — simply in order to express his own disappointment with the modern world

When former Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard, was finishing off his autobiography Lazarus Rising in 2010 I asked him whether…

Far from being a left-wing utopia, the music festival operates according to principles many Conservatives hold dear

Damian Thompson thinks Michael Finnissy’s History of Photography in Sound might also hint at a way forward for composers wondering where to go next

Plus: some fine paintings reminiscent of Manet at the Serpentine Gallery. And is there more to Duane Hanson than his ability to trick?

Plus: a Beckett play that Lloyd Evans found slightly boring, occasionally funny, entirely pointless and rather enjoyable

Lumpen, leaden and horribly inert, the film veers off in so many tedious directions you’ll need several espressos to keep you awake

Plus: a dud from Jonathan Dove at Opera Holland Park and a scorcher from Harrison Birtwistle at Aldeburgh

Plus: why London Road is such a dazzlingly good film - it’s as much to do with Javier de Frutos’s choreography as Rufus Norris’s direction

Plus: when Churchill arrived at the BBC and asked the French translator if ‘the Frog speech’ was ready yet

Surely the most luxuriously sensual of all operas, Tristan & Isolde makes voyeurs of us all.   This opera is being…

When I founded the American Conservative 13 years ago — the purpose being to shine a light on the neocon…

It was all going reasonably well until that old chap turned his back on me

I cried. I felt dirty afterwards. In fact, I went home and had a shower

I was surprised by the vulgarity, but I have yet to find an acceptable alternative

It’s much more lethal than dodging pachyderms in the African bush

Captaining a bridge team in a knock-out competition can be a thankless task. Sometimes, the hardest thing of all is…

A new book, Opening Repertoire: The Nimzo-Indian and Bogo-Indian by Christof Seilecki (Everyman Chess), focuses on the ever popular Nimzo-Indian…

Black to play. This is from Spassky-Fischer, World Championship, Reykjavik (Game 5) 1972. This is probably the most famous ‘dark-square’…

In Competition No. 2903 you were invited to supply a poem incorporating a dozen cricketing terms. English poets love cricket:…

Two clues are without definitions; their answers form the name of a person with a leading part in four works…

The unclued Down lights are books, entered in reverse as indicated by the phrase TURN-UP FOR THE BOOKS (1A 27…

Bright working-class children really are missing out – but the problem is at secondary schools, not at top firms

After years of misery, I’ve finally realised that I was being nudged the wrong way

Plus: The local landowner’s excessive tree-planting; and when it’s fine to blank someone

Sebastian and Nicholas Payne have made a profession out of their pleasures

We’re not sure, but the Labour party is having trouble finding one to lead it