Something doesn’t quite add up. On the one hand, the Prime Minister’s spouse, Lucy Turnbull, proudly announces via a soft…

Malcolm Turnbull is wrong about the effect of his proposed new morals code to stop ministers from philandering in the…

For some, it’s spiders or public speaking. For others, it’s being un-friended on Facebook or Jar Jar Binks returning to…

Of all the absurd things that have been said about Brexit, Chris Patten’s comment in his Spectator Australia interview with…

From the sandstones to the concrete monstrosities, Australia’s university students are returning to lecture halls and classrooms in coming weeks.…

The Turnbull government’s survival depends on a far more serious internal battle than whether Barnaby should keep his fly done…

Some could use the Barnaby Joyce Affair as an opportunity to kick the National party while it’s down… so let’s…

Once again the start of the federal parliamentary year has been marked by what has become an annual ritual. The…

Let me be honest. I don’t really see the point of Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives (‘AC’) party as presently configured.…

Indian billionaire Sanjeev Gupta is now in the same category as American entrepreneur Elon Musk in that any absurd idea…

Proscribe parallelism not promiscuity By proscribing sexual relations with ministerial staff and through his public moral condemnation of Nationals leader…

Bankruptcy, wrote Ernest Hemingway, happens in two ways — ‘gradually and then suddenly’. By now, Angela Merkel will be beginning…

On Monday, Angela Merkel did something quite extraordinary. As speculation about her party’s leadership mounted, she named an apparent successor:…

I love Americans’ kindness, generosity and energy but am often thrown by their exaggerated politeness and euphemistic speech. They use…

The NHS is in dire straits. I never thought I’d say this but as a doctor, and having seen the…

In the early 1980s when I was a schoolboy, my father, Brian Hartley, worked for Oxfam during a famine in…

One of the most memorable moments of the 2012 presidential debates came when the candidates were asked what they believed…

In recent years, living in South Africa has been a bit like having cancer. The malaise eating us from within…

Two things always strike me when I visit Vienna. The first is how easterly the city lies. This was more…

The news that Jeremy Corbyn met a Czechoslovakian agent three times during the 1980s, when the Cold War was still…

Home Someone called Jan Sarkocy said that, as a Czech Security Service agent in London under the name Jan Dymic,…

Everyone’s mood is affected by the news, especially bad news. A recent review found that heavy news-watchers show ‘misperception of…

The great indoors How to get the Winter Olympics experience without leaving England: — The Snow Centre, Hemel Hempstead: ‘London’s…

Love is love Sir: What total hypocrisy: the words attacking Barnaby Joyce from the same people who argued we must…

Bev died, aged 61. She was the wife of ‘Foxy’ John, kennel huntsman of our local hunt. Bev was the…

While the rest of the country waits for this spring to arrive, in Westminster the talk is all of spring…

I am boycotting Center Parcs. Admittedly, this is not going to have an enormous impact upon my life. It’s a…

When I mentioned on social media recently that I’d lost friends because of Brexit, I was quite surprised by the…

The fallout from Carillion’s bankruptcy spreads in slow motion — just as the outsourcing and construction giant’s finances gradually stretched…

At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries…

It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It…

The Spanish journalist Alberto Arce worked for Associated Press in Honduras in 2012 and 2013. After a year, he says:…

Often a blurb exaggerates, but rarely does it fundamentally misrepresent (unless it contains the words ‘In the tradition of…’). The…

Spanish restaurants in Germany are relatively rare, but not nearly as rare as biographies of General Franco. So when the…

The well-written spy novel is not a hotly contested field. Le Carré, Fleming, Deighton, a few Greenes, and that’s largely…

Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines…

The impermanence of works of art is a worry for curators though not usually for artists, especially not at the…

To bleak, boarded-up Margate — and a salt-and-vinegar wind that leaves my face looking like Andy Warhol’s botched 1958 nose-peel…

‘Welcome to our hearts again, Iolanthe!’ sings the fairy chorus in Gilbert and Sullivan’s fantasy-satire, and during this exuberant new…

Listen closely, among the shelves of the last remaining music shops, in student dorm rooms and amid the flat whites…

One of the best things about Beehives, Bobs and Blow-dries — yep, an exhibition about hairdressing — is the reaction…

The Donmar’s new show, The York Realist, dates from 2001. The programme notes tell us that the playwright, Peter Gill,…

None of us is above YouTube, and nothing is beneath it. We have of course all long since submitted to…

A bumper fortnight for Covent Garden florists thanks to a 20th-anniversary flower shower for the Royal Ballet’s Marianela Nunez and…

Audio description, or AD, as it is fondly called, is coming of age. Once consigned to the utility room of…

ITV’s Marcella (Monday) represents another triumphant breakthrough in the portrayal of female cops on television. Of course, thanks to more…

Dark River is the much-anticipated third feature from British writer/director Clio Barnard and it is one of those bleak, rural-…

Grade: A Yay, people with a modicum of wit. They come along so very rarely these days. A decade on…

This week’s edition of Ramblings with Clare Balding did all the usual things: a walk in the country (cue breathy…

There was an intriguing surprise at a fine performance of Carmen last week; the surtitles carrying the translation of the…

Gstaad It was nostalgia time at Prince Victor Emmanuel’s birthday party here, with many old friends reminiscing about our youthful…

My hangover was what the great Kingsley Amis describes in his Everyday Drinking guide as a ‘metaphysical’ hangover. Apart from…

Everything since the ZX Spectrum has pretty much left me cold. Ghetto blasters, Sony Walkmans, CDs, Apple Macs, iPods, PlayStations……

It’s nice being part of a community. That’s how bridge is: over the years, you get to know, or recognise,…

One of the sharpest lines in the Ruy Lopez (1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nc6 3 Bb5 f5) is widely…

Black to play. This position is from Drozdowski-Tay, chess.com 2014. Black played 1 … Qg6 which was good enough to…

In Competition No. 3036 you were invited to provide a resignation letter in the style of a well-known author. I…

Each of the eight unclued lights is a series of letters in alphabetical order which can be formed into eight…

The unclued lights can be preceded by or followed by the unclued word DOCTOR, which explains why I (Doc) am…

I’ve become obsessed with my BMI. For those of you who don’t know, it stands for body mass index and…

Despite the best efforts of this column (and the BBC), too many Brits regard the Winter Olympics with the same…

Q. Obviously one is delighted to have visits from close friends and family when one’s spouse is ailing, but how…

Sophie’s lives in an old pornographic cinema at the south end of Great Windmill Street, Soho. It is opposite McDonald’s…

In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, Bertie is moved to reward his inestimable valet for solving the unsolvable. Before requesting the…