Last week we asked whether Scott Morrison and the Australian medical authorities would learn the lessons of Italy and impose…

Give me sleepiness

Let’s be a lot more sceptical towards China

Decline of Australia

Today’s primary and secondary schools have been infested with Marxist doctrine

Homogenising data now alters long-held heat records

Facebook censorship of the origin of the Wuhan flu is batty

A noted progressive gets bitten by his own monster

How to earn more than eight times what your bank pays

From toilet paper to George Clooney

The media have been creating panic around the coronavirus

Life has been turned upside down

Coronavirus is taking Macron’s government to breaking point

‘Cancelled’ is quite a buzzword of our times, isn’t it? Up until about ten days ago, it referred mainly to…

It’s hard being a historical novelist in the age of Hilary Mantel

Pubs are fascinating at the moment. On the day that the Prime Minister advised us not to attend them, I…

Lisa Nandy on Brexit, Boris and the long race for the Labour leadership

Boris Johnson’s medical wingmen

I had believed this kind of infectious pandemic could not happen today

Coronavirus The government asked all people over 70 to cease from social contact for at least 12 weeks in order…

Those with signs of Covid-19 are being asked to ‘self-isolate’ (Latin insula, ‘island’). But do they have the mindset for…

As every Chancellor knows, behind every figure in the Treasury lie thousands of human stories. At times like these, saving…

Taking off Who came up with the concept of ‘helicopter money’? — The term is derived from an essay in…

For the Chancellor to produce an emergency bailout package just six days after delivering his Budget is an extraordinary state…

British science Sir: Dr Fink is right that the UK bats well above its weight through curiosity-driven research (‘Back to…

The world needs airlines — and, barring Armageddon, will still have some when this crisis is over. It will also…

Hulking fat chavs pushing shopping trolleys full of lavatory paper back to their Nissan Micras. I can’t think of a…

We are in a make-or-break moment for trust, not just in this government but in the British state itself. The…

Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we…

Even amid plague, economic apocalypse, and the cancellation of 2020, dumb stuff keeps happening. Besides, loads of us will now…

When we left this Britain on Thursday last week, life was almost as usual. Shops and restaurants were open. The…

Gustav Mahler was a passionate enthusiast for the colossal in music. Even so, his mighty eighth symphony stands apart, says Philip Hensher

Brian De Palma brings his film director’s eye to Are Snakes Necessary? (Hard Case, £16.99), written in collaboration with the…

Pop music has always been, to those who love it, to some degree tribal or factional; fans like to carve…

‘Miss World 1970’ is the rather glorious title that Jennifer Hosten won. That was the year that the contest, then…

‘I’m getting rather tired of me,’ begins Jan Morris in one of the diary entries in Thinking Again, almost certainly…

It was perhaps a mistake to re-read Sebastian Barry’s award-winning Days Without End before its sequel, A Thousand Moons, since…

Early one morning in October 1874 a barge carrying three barrels of benzoline and five tons of gunpowder blew up…

This is a paranormal book — by which I mean it exists in a truly out of the ordinary netherworld…

Steampunk, a shapeshifting and unpredictable genre, has a way of subverting the past, mischievously disordering the universe with historical what-ifs.…

‘Buy pink baby clothes,’Kim Jiyoung, the protagonist of this bestselling South Korean novel is told at the obstetrician’s surgery. Jiyoung’s…

A couple of friends have nominated it as music they would like played at their funerals. I’m not into programming…

To tell you the truth about The Truth, even though it stars Catherine Deneuve at her most Catherine Deneuve-ish (i.e.…

Film-makers are increasingly turning to the violent, provocatively slow or viscerally repulsive.What is driving this rise in extreme cinema? asks Francesca Steele

On Blueberry Hill sounds like a musical but it’s a sombre prison drama set in Ireland. Two bunkbeds. Above, an…

Anyone familiar with Joe Hill-Gibbins’s work will brace instinctively when the curtain goes up on his new Figaro. He’s the…

The world of 19th-century British music was raucous, but are there any masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered? wonders Richard Bratby

The director of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, talks to Sarah Ditum about her new biopic of Marie Curie, exile from Iran and her fears for the future of democracy

The world may be going to hell in a handcart but some things remain reassuringly unchanged: Julian Fellowes period dramas…

The accepted line about Bryan Ferry is that his is one of the greatest reinventions in English pop culture: Peter…

David Thomson talks to the director about Buster Keaton, falling out of favour with Hollywood, and his mentor Orson Welles

Martin Gayford

It wasn’t a coincidence that the US government chose Ellis Island as an immigration station. The crucial word is ‘island’.…

We live in a world where yesterday’s inconceivable becomes today’s commonplace, but even so. I never thought that the day…

I pictured the Green Book (which Rishi Sunak has been urged to tear up) as a matt card-bound thing like…

Q. We recently welcomed an 18-year-old au pair into our young family, and I’m pleased that she has settled in…

When the news leaked at the weekend that the government was considering telling those aged 70 and over to self-quarantine…

The three of us — me, Catriona and her daughter Skye — were having a wash and brush-up before going…

White to play. Shirov–Yuffa, Nutcracker Battle of the Generations, Moscow 2020. The rook on f7 is pinned, and 1 Rxf8+…

Coronavirus is causing chess events to fall like dominoes, with cancellations all over the world. But the Candidates tournament in…

In Competition No. 3140 you were invited to submit a poem in the style of a famous poet in which…

Eight thematic words (one of two words), which solvers have to discover and whose two-letter abbreviations form the anagram I’M…

The omitted letters reveal SATURDAY THE TWENTY-NINTH OF FEBRUARY TWENTY TWENTY. First prize Lewis Osborne, Newton Mearns, Glasgow Runners-up G.H.…

Bridge is obviously another casualty of the coronavirus. Clubs have closed their doors; tournaments have been cancelled; championships have been…

The socialite MP Chips Channon once noted in his diaries his feelings about an after-lunch snooze in parliament’s Library: ‘It…

The most exciting place on earth I have ever been to is the village where I live. And I don’t…

No use datelining any more, I’m here for the duration. Even the ski lifts have been ordered to close: chiuso,…