It beggars belief. After two and a half years in which a cohort of left-leaning politicians, elite bureaucrats, over-zealous health…

On this page last election eve I wrote, ‘Mums and dads across the country look set to elect a Labor…

China’s war on Christianity continues at a fast and furious rate

No wonder the Press is held in such contempt

Is this a good election to lose?

Banning political symbols sets a dangerous precedent

Under Labor, DFAT gets even dafter

Labor offers a re-run of the worst of Whitlam, Rudd and Gillard

Sanctions are morally dubious and a poor substitute for good foreign policy

Howard’s ‘broad church’ no longer exists

The end is nigh

The truth about my brother-in-law’s hair

What should his endgame be in any negotiations with Putin?

The television will be revolutionised

Bowls has a reputation as a sedate pastime, but it can be as fiercely competitive as any other sport. It…

Why is a brilliant BBC serial kept in its most secret vaults?

The creep of nannying announcements

  Ravenna, Italy   The war in Ukraine has caused an unholy convergence of the left and right in Italy.…

Why is Erdogan resisting Nato’s expansion?

Don’t ban Russia’s culture Sir: It is uncouth, illiterate and actually beneficial to Putin when theatres, opera houses and other…

Home The annual rate of inflation, impelled by energy costs, rose to 9 per cent, its highest since 1982. Unemployment…

Wagtime Footballers’ wives Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney are locked in a libel trial dubbed ‘Wagatha Christie’. The term WAGs,…

It is a glorious spring evening in Lviv and what could be better than a ballet gala at one of…

The biggest cruise ship yet builthas just been launched, but in like-for-like terms, it comes nowhere near the Syracusia,built c.…

From the start of the war in Ukraine, the democratic world has shown striking unity in the economic boycott of…

‘Forecasting is a mug’s game’ is a truism attributed to everyone from fantasy author Douglas Adams to former Bank of…

Twice during the Eurovision Song Contest our television lost the signal and the set went blank – once, mercifully, during…

Justified relief that soldiers are now coming out of the Azovstal steelworks alive is accompanied by anxiety about what might…

Boris Johnson has never quite been able to decide whether he wants to be a great unifier or a great…

It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It…

Sometimes an event or a phenomenon is so perplexing and so terrible that it’s best not to deal with it…

Apparently Anna Wintour wants to be seen as human, and Amy Odell’s biography goes some way to helping her achieve…

In June 1957, Robert Lowell attended a poetry reading by E.E. Cummings. Sitting dutifully and deferentially alongside him were Allen…

When Ray Bradbury was asked if his dystopian vision in Fahrenheit 451 would become a reality, he replied: ‘I don’t…

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…

It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St.…

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that…

Eighty years ago, just after midnight on 28 March 1942, the British destroyer HMS Campbeltown crept up the estuary of…

The barbarity of the Russian civil war almost defies description – but in that, too, the Reds triumphed, says Antony Beevor

Lohengrin is early, just after Tannhäuser in the cavalcade of Wagner’s masterpieces, with a swan-drawn Arthurian hero in thrall to…

Describing the Venice Biennale, like pinning down the city itself, is a practical impossibility. There is just too much of…

Last April Fools’ Day, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo wound up their award-winning film review show on BBC Radio 5…

Every so often, Jason Pierce drifts into focus. It happened at the end of the 1980s, when his then group…

Terence Davies’s Benediction is a biopic of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon told with great feeling and tenderness.…

Imagine growing up with a whole orchestra as your plaything. Richard Strauss’s father was the principal horn of the Munich…

Hampstead’s latest play is a knotty rape drama by Naomi Wallace set in Kentucky. Four teenagers with weird names meet…

Craig Raine on the challenges of translating poets’ lives and work to the screen

It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set…

The education of the young is an essential component for the transmission of culture from one generation to the next.…

We all know ‘adult’ the noun, and we know what an ‘adult’ is (‘because,’ as a friend said to me,…

The timing of Brendon McCullum’s appointment as England’s Test match coach couldn’t be better for him, or for the matey…

The unclued entries have something in common, and are the most recent of their type. One umlaut should be ignored…

Q. I’m 28 and lucky enough to own a four-bed house in Notting Hill. I let three of the rooms…

I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous…

The unclued lights when arranged as 12, 11, 43, 5, 24, 1D, 1A form Chambers’definition of MULLET at 30D. First…

‘It’s not as nice as it looks,’ said my husband, not leaving time to look it in the mouth before…

White to play. Vachier-Lagrave-Caruana, Bucharest 2022. The Bh4 can retreat to g3, f2 or e1. Which one is best, and…

In Competition No. 3249, you were invited to submit an extract from a Mills & Boon novel whose central character…

The Superbet Chess Classic in Bucharest concluded last weekend in a dramatic tiebreak between Wesley So, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Levon…

New York Living a life of pleasure is fun, but it can also become tiresome. Living an ethical life of…

‘You coming to help us poo pick?’ said my friend Terry, in a desperate sounding voice message. The builder boyfriend…

After two nights at Le Grau-du-Roi (the King’s Pond) and a night spent within the medieval walls of Aigues-Mortes (Stagnant…

It was time to celebrate! The Schapiro Spring Foursomes was back again after the enforced Covid break, and the EBU’s…

Five years ago, I put my friend Nell Butler in touch with Katharine Birbalsingh, Britain’s most outspoken headmistress. I was…