You gotta hand it to them. Unlike the Coalition, the leaders of the Labor party have no problem whatsoever prosecuting…

The current consideration by the Australian Human Rights Commission of a complaint by Green Senator Mehreen Faruqi against fellow Senator…

On our woke judges and a disgraceful miscarriage of justice in New Zealand

Why ‘sensemaking’ institutions must challenge dominant narratives

Our collapsing electricity system

Keating’s advice is seriously misguided, as is Musk’s

What would Menzies make of today’s Liberal party?

How our first female PM cancelled women

A crime thriller worthy of the best

After the 2016 presidential elections, it became obvious that the US mainstream media had abandoned its vocation of being both…

Will The Parthenon Project seize the Elgin Marbles?

I have a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and her parents on the wall of my bathroom, not out of…

Is this the beginning of the end for Mark Zuckerberg?

The Truss agenda is dead

What will the Halloween Budget bring?

The case against a stripped-back coronation

Should the Democrats expect a shellacking in the US midterms?

The first time I went to Mongolia was in 2014, when I travelled across the country with the actress Michelle…

No bird species is immune from the latest virus

Home Liz Truss said in a BBC interview as Prime Minister that she wanted to ‘say sorry for the mistakes…

It’s been a great week for the powerful fantasies of fiction (see more below), but over the weekend no novel…

Liz Truss was spot-on in arguing that the only way in which a state can flourish is by combining low…

Paying the price Sir: Lionel Shriver’s piece about university standards rang true to me (‘University is supposed to be hard’,…

Out to grass If Liz Truss is forced out of office (and doesn’t also resign her parliamentary seat as Tony…

Seldom has support for a government fallen so far, so fast. Polls show that 24 per cent of the public…

At the first stage of the Conservative leadership race, when Liz Truss was trying to win MPs’ support, her message…

In the House of Commons on Monday, someone accused Liz Truss’s government of being ‘in office but not in power’.…

I’ve chosen to write about corporate tax rates this week not because they’re the sexiest subject available but because –…

I read about the national shortage of blood last week with a feeling of gloomy inevitability. The brains of the…

One of the most important ingredients in the oil used to anoint King Charles during his coronation is becoming a…

These are bleak times in our land, and we must take our pleasures where we can. Personally I have been…

Francis Ford Coppola’s superb film The Godfather changed American cinema and, by extension, American culture. The film had it all:…

Mutilated, strangled, suffocated or beaten to death: these are just some of the methods used to get rid of popes…

In 1930, when she was 19 years old, Edda Mussolini married Galeazzo Ciano. His father was a loyal minister in…

Ronald Blythe, the celebrated author of Akenfield, is to turn 100 next month, and to mark his centenary a beguiling…

‘Astonish me!’ was the celebrated demand that the impresario Sergei Diaghilev made of Jean Cocteau when he was devising Erik…

Some time ago I was a guest at a book festival in France where we were invited to dinner in…

It takes chutzpah to tackle a national treasure as jealously loved and gatekept as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.…

Tom Miller on the cult of personality that China’s ‘core leader’ has so ruthlessly constructed

How fascinating it is to see that Australia’s Brendan Cowell is playing John Proctor in the new English National Theatre…

Being of a squeamish sensibility and prejudiced by a low opinion of recent BBC drama, I can claim only a…

At the start of Somewhere Boy, an 18-year-old boy is rescued from an isolated house by his aunt Sue following…

My Policemanis a forbidden love drama starring both Harry Styles – whose bid for movie stardom continues apace – and…

Do we need another Lucian Freud exhibition? After years of exposure to his paintings of naked bodies posed like casualties…

Robert Gore-Langton explores the remarkable life of televangelist Tammy Faye, and its descent into chaos

Oh, nostalgia – so much better than it used to be! You’d never have guessed pop music was once the…

Imagine a folk dance without music. Actually, you don’t have to: poke about on YouTube and you’ll find footage from…

Good, starring David Tennant, needs more dosh spent on it. The former Doctor Who plays John, a literary academic living…

Australian manufacturers have long been obliged to alert consumers to health hazards. As soon as we found out that peanuts…

Richard Littlejohn wrote recently in Britain’s Daily Mail about an 18-page Inclusive Language Guide which has been sent out to…

New York Rodney Dangerfield was the American Benny Hill: lewd, funny and not exactly politically correct where the weaker sex…

The grandsons are putting two and two together. Grandad is always lying down and groaning when they video call and…

5 (the number of GOLD RINGS, from ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’: 34/22A) x 103 (the number of the PSALM…

In his picture from 1932, ‘Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare’, Henri Cartier-Bresson caught the moment when a man in a hat…

The Piazza is not a piazza – a realisation which is always irritating – but a restaurant in the eaves…

Dear oh dear, as exasperated kings are known to murmur – just look at the state of rugby union. But…

Q. My brother, who lives in southern France, uses unsavoury words to gain my attention, such as ‘infernal swine’, ‘schweinhund’…

I had a bicycle accident last week. Not terrible, but not great either. Of the five I’ve had since I…

In Competition No. 3271, you were invited to submit a poem about the Oxford comma. Thérèse Coffey’s much-maligned edict about…

Laikipia, Kenya No portrait of Boris Johnson hangs in the hall of Balliol, his old Oxford College. Hardly a surprise,…

‘Excuse me, I’m looking for something to catch a mouse that won’t cause it any distress,’ said the young chap…

The same word appears as eight headwords in Chambers. Unclued lights indicate what they mean. The word will appear in…

White to play. Mamedyarov-J. Polgar, Fide World Blitz, Dubai 2014. Black is lagging in development, and her last move, 10…Nb8-d7,…

‘I can comprehend Alekhine’s combinations well enough; but where he gets his attacking chances from and how he infuses such…

High-level online bridge tournaments started almost as soon as lockdown began. It was going to take more than a worldwide…