Don’t sign! warned our editorial on this page last week. Our readership may not match that of the the daily…

In the England of my childhood, greengrocers were heavily reliant on South African farmers. This was still the case when…

I like Canberra. I’d like it even more if it had been named ‘Shakespeare’, one of the options on the…

PM’s plain speaking about motivations and excuses The Commonwealth criminal code defines ‘terrorist act’ as one intended to coerce or…

It would be difficult to imagine a more cowardly and contemptible action, or one heavier with the promise of long-term…

Next year in Jerusalem Scott Morrison has no alternative now but to move the Australian Embassy from Tel Aviv to…

There is a famous fable that if you threw a frog into a pot of hot water it would immediately…

Stan Lee’s contribution to modern pop culture was nearly without comparison. His creations in the pages of Marvel Comics –…

Trump does not nibble, he leaps, to high ground or low. North Korea is an issue ripe for a Trump…

The Bruce Munro interview

At David Cameron’s final Prime Minister’s Questions, a Labour MP asked him how his plan to get the Tories to…

Did any of us, whatever our opinions, expect the level of blustering indignation that has emerged since the 2016 referendum?…

 Washington, DC   Ever since America elected Donald Trump, Democrats have fantasised about removing him from power. They’ve dreamed of…

How did we get into this Brexit mess? Why is it proving so difficult to leave the EU? Was it…

One thing I love about my adopted country is the widespread cultural contempt for dullness. Unlike North Americans, intelligent British…

The most important point about the draft Brexit withdrawal agreement is that, once it is ratified, the United Kingdom will…

A new play, Switzerland, which opened in the West End this month, seems to have demonised Patricia Highsmith once again.…

France has been in a state of organised uprising this week, with 300,000 motorists taking to the streets and autoroutes…

Home Five pizza-eating cabinet ministers — Andrea Leadsom, Penny Mordaunt, Liam Fox, Michael Gove and Chris Grayling — put it…

‘Away with the cant of “measures not men”! — the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the…

Black Friday When and where did the term ‘Black Friday’ originate? — It was used to describe a collapse in…

The country’s champions of free speech — the police — were recently out in force to ensure that the alt-right…

There is no ‘good’ Brexit Sir: David Harper claims to know ‘what the population of the UK voted for’ in…

It will be interesting to see whether the about-face of the Daily Mail on Brexit makes the slightest difference to…

If we are to ban states of mind, my vote would be for self-righteousness first, followed by sententiousness, with maybe…

Catching a train last week at London’s St Pancras I encountered a man playing a piano. You can do this…

I’d recommend any aspiring writer to marry a jazz drummer. It’s done wonders for my powers of concentration. If I…

The arrest of Carlos Ghosn and the move to oust him as chairman of Nissan in Japan has stunned the…

David Kemp’s first of five volumes in the history of Australian liberalism, The Land of Dreams, How Australians Won Their…

James I and VI liked to term himself Rex Pacificus. Like most politicians who talk a lot about working for…

It is easy to assume that the contours of art history are unchanging, its major landmarks fixed for ever. Actually,…

The People are angry. In fact, they’re bloody furious. As the lights flash up on David Pountney’s production of Prokofiev’s…

Narcos is back on Netflix, set in Mexico this time, with a cool, world-weary, manly voiceover swearily lecturing us at…

I wonder what Michelle Obama, the former First Lady who remade that role in her own image, would make of…

La Bayadère opens with a sacred flame and ends with an earthquake. In between, Marius Petipa’s ballet of 1877 gives…

Michelle Terry, chatelaine of the Globe, wants to put an end to penis-led Shakespeare by casting women in roles intended…

The major releases this week are Robin Hood, as a big Hollywood retelling, and The Girl in the Spider’s Web,…

Grade: D+ I promise you this isn’t simply class loathing. Yer toffs have contributed to British rock and pop and…

As leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Richard Tognetti has never done quite what was expected, other than to be…

New York   If I wrote this in one of those newspaper diaries about metropolitan life, no one would believe…

Evenings, I sit in a chair facing the cave interior and Catriona lies on the new sofa facing me (and,…

Lying in bed one night as the rain pounded down, I became aware of a yellow patch forming on the…

Trainer Dan Skelton and his jockey brother Harry have 100 winners on the board already but for most of us…

DO NOT DOUBLE PARTSCORES WHEN PLAYING TEAMS. Here is Geir Helgemo somehow fooling his expert opponents into defending like total…

As I write, the London world championship is tied at 3½-3½, after seven games. In striving to move ahead, the…

White to play. This is a variation from Caruana-Carlsen, World Championship, London 2018. White has sacrificed a piece in order…

In Competition No. 3075 you were invited to submit poems by Donald Trump.  The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, which…

Three unclued lights featured the remaining ones, two of two words, the others paired. Two of them do double duty.…

The unclued lights are presenters of BLUE PETER: individually at 39; pairs are 3/2, 7/22, 15A/15D, 15A/17, 25/14, and 32/31,…

When I proposed to Caroline back in 2000, she was a trainee solicitor and I was a freelance journalist. In…

In recent years, much scrutiny has been paid to the workings of social media algorithms. Driven by escalating competition for…

Q. I am organising my 30th birthday party weekend at a large country house kindly lent to me by friends…

I was trying to remember what I once knew about the theology of the Reformation and especially the various factions’…

Latest despatches from the Dictionary Wars bring news of Oxford’s words of the year, a counterblast to last week’s words…