Given that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now apparently acknowledges that an unexpected and unexplainable ‘pause’ in…

Will its allies around the world ever recover that confidence in the United States, which they lost with President Obama’s…

September 7 was the first election day I have not spent handing out how-to-vote cards since I was 15. Not…

For me, the worst day of any campaign is election day. After three years of intense, all-consuming activity the phones…

I remain in rehab following the election nightmare. When the all-shining, coiffed, permed and waxed Abbott family appeared at the…

Far from being dismissed, David Leyonhjelm may spark a genuine libertarian renaissance

And I’m not telling the bureaucrats

The historical revisionism around the discredited former PM must end

Unless something drastic changes in the polls, the Tories will pay dearly for treating Miliband as a joke. And so will the rest of us

Tristram Hunt represents the slice of Labour that Miliband most needs to hold on to

Social networks make reinventing yourself at university much trickier

The lessons of a perpetual guest

Germany’s integrationalist elite are prepared to pay out forever to protect the euro

Was there a conspiracy against Andrew Mitchell? And why have the police gone quiet on the subject?

James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I…

A selection from the latest edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, edited by Gyles Brandreth

Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…

Next week, those who made dire predictions of ruinous climate change face their own inconvenient truth.  The summary of the…

Home The government sold 6 per cent of Lloyds Banking Group to big investors for £3.2 billion. It still owns…

The looming centenary of the outbreak of the first world war offers an opportunity to break away from the Blackadder/Oh!…

Vitamins and the veil A judge at Blackfriars Crown Court allowed a niqab-wearing defendant to identify herself only to a…

Momentarily banish thoughts of policemen on duty at the House of Commons, and picture a Roman pleb. You will probably…

Party politics Sir: I don’t think it is true that I would be unhappy in any party, as Ross Clark…

We are not allowed to know any details about the Muslim woman, charged with intimidating a witness, who has been…

I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches…

What strategy should we adopt to cope with the British Medical Association? Its members kill more people each year than…

Royal Mail delivers to 29 million UK addresses; last year it generated £9 billion of revenues, of which £324 million…

The correspondence between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is good for celebrity-spotting but too cloyingly self-absorbed to be of wider interest, says D. J. Taylor

Sathnam Sanghera, in his family memoir The Boy with the Topknot, heaped much largely affectionate contempt and ridicule on his…

In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant…

The recorder of early Jewish history has two sources of evidence. One is the Bible. Its centrality was brought home…

The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is…

In South Korea, some 20 million people share just five surnames. Every one of Denmark’s top 20 surnames ends in…

My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many…

My brother Pericles Wyatt, as my father liked to say, is by blood the rightful king of England, the nephew…

Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this…

After the success of their animal series of monographs, Reaktion Books have had the clever idea of doing something similar…

Confronted by this lavishly endorsed book — ‘compelling’ (David Lodge), ‘gripping’(John le Carré),‘thrilling’ (Jonathan Freedland) — I felt depressed. Two…

It is peculiarly apt that the author of this autobiography should be the man who coined that now fashionable term…

In 1958 a vast international trade fair was held just outside Brussels. As well as being a showcase for industry,…

William Cook is inspired by England’s sculptural heartland in Yorkshire, just as Moore and Hepworth were

Like all artists of independent spirit, David Tress (born 1955) resists categorisation. He has been called a Romantic and a…

Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by…

Ah yes, Candide, the adventures of an innocent abroad in ‘the best of all possible worlds’, as philosophers of the…

It’s a cynical start to the Royal Opera’s season to have this 1984 production of Puccini’s last opera Turandot. Not…

Someone who knows their Dianaology will have to fill me in – did this actually happen? The late Princess Di…

You wait a whole lifetime for a lavishly shot, starrily cast, mega-budget gangster drama set in Birmingham to come along.…

Of all folk memories the Blitz remains one of the most enduring. In the autumn of 1940 the Luftwaffe strafed…

Gstaad Why are hacks scared to state the obvious? In Britain the excuse is the strict libel laws. But in…

‘Jeremy! Jeremy! I can’t believe it! There’s no bloody booze!’ I’d walked into the music room where Elgar and Fauré…

The Builder Boyfriend has nearly moved in. I say nearly because we are both quite nervous about committing to each…

My village, Stoke Bruerne in south Northamptonshire, is just getting back to normal after a great influx of visitors for…

It was towards dusk by the time we had given the tourist police the slip and started climbing the pyramid…

If you are allergic to wasp stings, may I give you a word of advice? Keep away from them! Don’t…

The recently concluded Fide (World Chess Federation) World Cup held at Tromso in Norway resulted in a triumph for Vladimir…

Black to play. This position is from Riazantsev-Felgaer, Tromso 2013. Black’s forces have invaded the white kingside. Can you spot…

In Competition 2815 you were invited to contribute to the booming genre of self-help by proposing a new title guaranteed…

16/17 (four words in total) is a work by 11 which suggests the remaining unclued lights. Five clues contain a…

The puzzle marked a DOUBLE TON (42/27) by DUMPYNOSE (11) in THE SPECTATOR (17/19). Remaining unclued lights suggest a DOUBLETON:…

For most people, the question of whether to ban the burka is a purely theoretical one. Not for me. As…

Golf has reached the eye-watering end of the season in the United States. By Sunday night, one man in a…

Q. Some years ago, on holiday in Egypt, we found ourselves in the company of a couple who wanted to…

A restaurant in a synagogue may be too mad even for this column but we are Jews, so why not?…

One man’s grammatical nicety is another man’s grotesque solecism, I thought, as I perused a report in the Gulf News,…