Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton is the public face of Covid-19 in the Lockdown State. It is Professor Sutton…

Half-hearted Tory Spare a thought for the UK’s embattled lamb producers. How long will it be, they are wondering, until…

Trumps like us, baby we were born to run Mr Bruce Springsteen has, depending on how one views these things,…

Woke inconsistencies provide boundless unintended humour

Health bureaucrats and actively complicit doctors are now guilty of crimes against humanity

Trump Derangement Syndrome clearly infects the Aussie media

The insane taxes on tobacco products are counter-productive

The swamp men cometh

2019 Thawley Essay Prize Winner

Income Management and the Cashless Debit Card (CDC) have long faced opposition from those who claim that not allowing welfare…

A Biden-Harris victory will be a disaster for Australia, too

Churchill’s wartime passion

Thanks to a combination of night-time curfews, social-distancing rules, pubs closing, restaurants failing, the ‘rule of six’ and compulsory mask-wearing,…

Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch on the ‘poison’ of identity politics

Covid has become a get-out clause for shoddy service

Covid has accelerated China’s rise

Restrictions on the National Archives are a disaster for historians

Are we looking at a W-shaped recovery?

London’s war on motorists isn’t helping anybody

NHS Test and Trace was doomed from the start

Special Offa A regulation passed by the Welsh government to prevent people travelling from Covid hotspots in England has brought…

At the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis it was easy to see why the Prime Minister was so keen to…

Home After ten days spent trying to persuade Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, to accede to the city…

State of the Union Sir: Writing in a week that an opinion poll shows 58 per cent support for independence…

Here’s a tip. When the Foreign Office advises against going somewhere, hop on the next plane. The mandarins have advised…

To beat the virus, the government is asking us to keep to simple hands-face-space guidelines. When these are not followed,…

Is that a light at the end of the tunnel — or a second lockdown thundering unstoppably towards us? News…

The Hay Festival, memorably described by Bill Clinton as ‘the Woodstock of the mind’, has, over the past couple of…

There’s a reason why No. 10 is always so inclined to ratchet up the tension in any given scenario. Downing…

You have to give it to Donald Trump: he never stops trying. In a letter dated 25 September, he wrote…

Having not watched television for nine months and already growing bored of the 1,000-piece jigsaw of General Alfredo Stroessner (part…

 Portland, Oregon In the days when you could still watch a nature documentary without feeling as if you were sitting…

The Prime Minister may have lost his bounce –but perhaps that’s no bad thing, says Lynn Barber

In late April 1962 Los Angeles police shot and killed an unarmed black man, Ronald X Stokes, during a disturbance…

The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah…

In 1835 the first two Egyptian antiquities were registered in the British Museum: a pair of red granite lions from…

Elaborated over a writing career that spans half a century — a career crowned with every honour save the Nobel…

Eighty years ago this summer Britain was facing its greatest moment of peril as Göring’s Luftwaffe attacked airfields, cities and…

Of all the successful modern female writers documenting their search for love, none has been as endearing as Dolly Alderton.…

In the seventh and final chapter of this small but lingeringly powerful book, the author reveals his motivation for writing…

If you want to see the very best of Gauguin and Matisse, go east. That was the case in 1914…

So upsetting it would have been, for those of us who rate Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers so highly, if…

The journals of the plague year from the point of view of culture are getting weirder and weirder from Daniel…

Attila the Hun might have been hard to stop but Verdi’s opera Attila was stopped in its tracks at the…

Italy has long captivated romantics from rainy, dreary, orderly northern Europe. Goethe, Stendhal, Keats and Shelley all flocked to Italy…

The Climb is, essentially, a bickering bromance as two longtime pals bicker bromantically down the years, and it doesn’t sound…

Like many a political thriller before it, BBC1’s Roadkill began with a politician emerging into the daylight to face a…

Three shows in a week! Why, it was just like the first week of March. There was, however, little of…

In Bad Taste is a slapstick comedy about five female terrorists who murder the governor of the Bank of England.…

Obviously, we’re living through an era of censorious puritanism. Granted, the contemporary creeds are different from those of the 16th…

Claudia Massie explores the cinematic majesty and mind-bending visual trickery of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen

Michael Scammell Coming out of Melbourne lockdown is like coming down from drugs. Or more precisely coming down from the…

My last NHS scan showed a shadow on a rib. The scan report couldn’t decide between a new cancer metastasis…

The unclued lights take an extra letter to make BRAMBLING (1A), BUDGIE (12A), STARLING (14A), REDSTART (23A), BRANCHER (27A), TURACO…

New York It’s nice to finally be in the Bagel, a place where the cows have two legs and no…

The girl in the posh soap shop put her right arm out, palm flat in my face, and shouted: ‘Stand…

When (if) the world returns to normal and live bridge tournaments resume, there are two things I will miss after…

Exmoor I am heading to Exmoor for the first time since I was last there in 1977 — and as…

It’s over. Magnus Carlsen’s undefeated streak in classical chess has finally come to an end, after 125 games. It is…

Black to play. Sjugirov–Paravyan, Russian Higher League, October 2020. A piece for a pawn down, Black’s follow up was subtle…

Solvers should heed a warning when deducing ten symmetrically placed unclued lights (two of three words and one of two…

In Competition No. 3171, a challenge suggested by a kind reader, you were invited to submit a requiem in verse…

One of the things I hadn’t anticipated about the pandemic is that it would turn me into an English nationalist.…

You might hate the Premier League for its determination to suck all the money out of football, but at least…

Q. An old friend offered to treat me to a birthday lunch, provided I choose and book the restaurant myself.…

Oxford is not an easy city to homogenise; but that doesn’t mean you can’t try. I found a vast shopping…

QAnon, the conspiracy theorist’s conspiracy theory, teaches that President Donald Trump is in secret warfare with a worldwide network of…