This week’s fraudulent interest rate cut is as good a portent as any for what to expect in the forthcoming…

Australia has some beautiful buildings. Some of the most beautiful are in the Gothic Revival style, such as William Wardell’s…

A Bankstown horror story

The pernicious consequences

Now it’s rule by lawyers and it imperils democracy

VP Vance’s plain speaking on free speech & populism

The ABC’s bias is unforgivable

The Coalition must pull out of Paris

I may be a fanboy, but this is wrong

Monocausal explanations are usually wrong

The political class brought it here and encourages it

I was 30 when I first went skiing, and up for absolutely anything. I was a successful party caterer who…

In 2015, an orthopaedic surgeon called Limb, with three other doctors called Limb, wrote a paper on whether people’s names…

In the Thuringian city of Weimar, opposite the theatre where the National Assembly hashed out Germany’s constitution in 1918, stands…

Sir Roger Scruton may not be the Prime Minister’s favourite author. Apparently Keir Starmer prefers Victoria Hislop. But as he…

It’s never a good thing when your cardiologist sounds alarmed on the phone. Come in tomorrow, he said: we’ll get…

In the fight against climate change, China loves to present itself as the world’s White Knight. Armed with wind turbines…

Paris What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months now…

Frivolous state funding isn’t only going to chancers, the plain lucky and the devious, but also to those who would…

In a scrubby paddock on the edge of Bulawayo, I walked up to a half-broken leatherwood tree growing in a…

Nearly six million people are on out-of-work benefits. It is claimed that, for most of those, going back to work…

Monday, and Camden council have yet again failed to empty my food waste bin. They never miss my rubbish or…

In the America of the 1950s, one question dominated foreign policy: ‘Who lost China?’ The Communist victory in the Chinese…

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said that, to guarantee the security of Ukraine, he was ‘ready and willing’…

Wonderfully useless Sir: Michael Simmons overlooks some scandalous examples of frivolous funding right under his nose (‘Waste land’, 15 February).…

Meeting expectations Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin had a telephone call prior to US and Russian officials meeting in Saudi…

If the new Trump era has a theme, it’s one of quixotic disruption with random consequences. In that spirit, stand…

What does a party get after nearly two decades in office, collapsing public services, an internal civil war and a…

Marco Rubio, the US Secretary of State, is not a MAGA groupie, but a believer in the Nato alliance. He…

Whatever you think of the blizzard of executive orders howling from the White House, at least the new President doesn’t…

In its infinite wisdom, the Labour government appears to be reconsidering the introduction of a blasphemy law in the UK.…

In January last year the European Union revealed that it had dreamed up a ‘secret plan’ to sabotage the economy…

Her imaginative, edgy sketches, though lacking technical expertise, often look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era

MI5 and Special Branch intercepted Hill’s mail for decades, but the former Master of Balliol was an impartial teacher and certainly no Soviet agent

Returning to his roots in horror fiction, Fowler portrays Londinium as a dismal citadel, ruled by an enfeebled dynasty clinging to pointless rituals

Tyler is known for making the ordinary compelling, but this quiet tale of family relationships is subtle to the point of stupor

The octogenarian writer seems unable to resist the burlesque, describing the most lurid encounters at an apparently droll remove

Howard Amos portrays a once hopeful country now sweeping the past under the carpet as it alternates between pitying itself and pitting itself against the rest of the world

The 17th-century broadsheets revelled in describing the ‘lewd, abominable, corrupt’ nature of the ‘haggs’ and ‘she-devils’ indicted for homicide

Peter Conrad reminds us how the skilled stage performer, always yearning for enchantment, even introduced a few disguised magic tricks into his fiction

Simone Young conducted Mahler’s Third at the Opera House on Wednesday 19 February and with its dense lyricism, its lush…

Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players…

My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic:…

My patience with the cult of Pina Bausch is wearing paper thin. She was taken from us 16 years ago,…

The monkey is an organ-grinder’s monkey toy. Wind up the key jutting out of its back, and its lips will…

Sometimes the mind needs to take a break. And I can’t think of a better stopping-off place than the soothing,…

There are nights when one realises quite how much effort the business end of showbusiness must be. On a bitterly…

There’s more than a grain of truth in the popular caricature of a curator as a mother hen clucking frantically…

I saw the world end in a Bethnal Green leisure centre. Regents Opera’s Ring cycle, which began in 2022 in…

Unicorn, Mike Bartlett’s new play, involves some characters in chairs discussing a sexual threesome. That’s the entire show. Polly (Nicola…

The White Lotus, now back for a third series, could perhaps be best described as Death in Paradise for posh…

If you’ve ever suspected that left-wing crusaders are whingers with a chip on their shoulder and a negative outlook on…

‘Palindrome’ has been part of the English language since 1636 and means (as you know) a word or phrase that…

This column nearly didn’t happen. Just as I sat down to write, disaster! My dishwasher lost its connection to the…

Q. Every year my husband takes two weeks’ prime salmon fishing on a Scottish river. It’s a really nice holiday…

‘No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,’ declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he…

I’ve just returned from Colombia, where I’ve been visiting my daughter. She’s doing a modern languages degree and has to…

We were almost having a symposium and I was invited to define Toryism in one sentence. I replied that one…

Kenya In my dream my father is sitting next to me in the car as we drive around our hometown…

One of the best things about growing older is being far less easily embarrassed. You have dealt with so many…

You may be forgiven, if you are a regular reader of this column, for thinking that my primary motivation in…

My mother was about to be taken to a care home called Willow Trees, and the first thing my instincts…