While the media’s attention is distracted by Madam Speaker’s and other politician’s curious choices in executive travel, this week is…

It looks like we may have an early election. So that my readers will be well-informed citizens ready to take…

Visiting accountant turned property investor Kate Braybrook and building tradie husband Mark, who have relocated from Melbourne. Looked at 20…

With talk of an early election, it is time politicians focussed on what really matters to the electorate

Recent rallies in Australia’s main cities have pitted a variety of comical eccentrics against each other

A US scandal has abortion doctors offering a macabre menu of baby body parts

Political self interest threatens our national security and the safety of our submariners

Raising the GST will make the problem worse, not better

Edmund Capon curates an extraordinary collection of modern Australian art

Online services have streamlined potentially shameful acts as never before – but don’t ever believe the promise that no one will find out

They are not doing their job – while paying themselves handsomely

I think I can understand the young people seduced by Isis– because once upon a time, it could have been me

If the right stays split, the unpopular Monsieur Flanby could walk straight back into the presidency

From Nehru’s India to Varoufakis’s Greece, the trendy doctrines of our universities have much to answer for

In the age of social media, ‘breaking the final taboo’ is becoming de rigueur. But death is taboo for good reason

We need releases for our nervous energy, and resistance-followed-by-surrender sensations do seem to work

Once you’ve been, you’ll be back. But everyone needs somewhere to start

“Whether it’s in Iraq, Syria, Libya or elsewhere — as Prime Minister, if I believe there is a specific threat…

Home Parents would be able to have their children’s passports removed if they were suspected of planning to travel abroad…

Plus: A worthy successor to the BBC Micro; and a behavioural science project at KCL graduation day

Plus: Water cannon in Northern Ireland; what truancy can save in holiday costs; and the odds of an official message on ET

Let these suicidal lunatics get on with slaughtering each other — why invite disaster by plunging into battle?

From ‘Coal and its problems’, The Spectator, 24 July 1915: Instead of attempting to regulate prices, the government ought to have…

Plus: A defence of Christopher Lee; Americanisms; Nick Kyrgios; and croquet

The SNP has given the Conservative and Labour parties a lot to think about

This is why we do not see more ordinary people in politics: the elite do not approve of their opinions

I’m out in all weathers with my pick and barrow, and when I come in I just want to go back out and do one more rock

Plus: BT’s bigness problem; interesting times for metal-traders; and Franz Lehár’s take on the euro crisis

Yasmin Khan’s superlative The Raj at War finally does justice to the crucial contribution of the Indian army to Hitler’s defeat, says William Dalrymple

Francis O’Gorman’s Worrying: A Literary and Cultural Guide finds not much hope for the human race — but at least worriers, being sensitive to others, apparently make good team mates

Daniel Swift takes ‘the Queen of Formalism’ to task over her scientific approach to poetry in her spiky new collected essays, The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar

Two new books on intelligence — Intercept by Gordon Corera and Why Spy? by Brian Stewart and Samantha Newbery — find that had Britain been less hidebound by secrecy it could have led the world in computer science

McEwen’s extraordinary botanical works, beautifully illustrated in this volume from Kew, glow with life and individuality that repay the closest scrutiny

Harry Mount scatters alpha anecdotes as he swelters up Mediterranean hillsides (in a slightly silly hat) on the track of his legendary hero, in Harry Mount’s Odyssey

Nigel Williams’s editor should have returned R.I.P. with the words ‘do it again’

In his memoir A Different Kind of Weather, the gifted Tory politician and man of letters William Waldegrave comes across as a noble soul full of misplaced self-reproach

Health and safety laws and New Labour targets put paid to the visionary original adventure playgrounds, but they seem to be making a comeback, says Maisie Rowe

Compilation albums are a big deal these days – especially if you're negotiating over 50 years' worth of music, says Annie Nightingale

Plus: too much injudicious filleting undermines Garsington Opera’s enterprising staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Mendelssohn’s complete incidental music

Plus: the night Francis Bacon booed Princess Margaret off stage and Lucian Freud met his second wife

Plus: a play starring Stephen Merchant at the Wyndham’s Theatre that makes a compelling case against Richard Bean

As the bodies pile up, the plot’s plausibility flies out of the window in this dodgy debut from Robert Carlyle

Plus: the frightening new facts about Pluto and the strangest sounds of the week

Plus: the man who did more than anyone else to popularise art and culture in Britain gets his first full TV profile

It’s the play with no name, literally. Chekhov’s first play, written in 1878, was never completed despite its estimated five…

Longing for the Athens of old, I seek casting and a playwright for today's grim drama

It looks broken, and he's always losing it. But when he asks for it back, sane men agree

I will fight this PCN all the way to the European Court of Justice

Our addiction to smart phones

If anything ruffles Clive Cox, it doesn’t show

Moving house is traumatic but moving bridge club is worse. Young Chelsea left Barkston Gardens, its home for over 30…

Sadly, Michael Adams, for many years Britain’s leading grandmaster, will not be playing in the British Championship, which starts next…

Black to play. This is from Williams-Hawkins, -British Championship 2014. How can Black finish off his attack with a fine…

In Competition No. 2907 you were invited to imagine that poets, living or dead, had been recruited to compose verse…

The unclued lights are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. Elsewhere, ignore two accents.   Across   1    Transfers…

The unclued lights are all preceded by GREAT to form the phrases that can be confirmed in Brewer. (The clue…

No, the #ToriesForCorbyn campaign isn’t fair, but it’s within the norms of politics – and a very effective weapon

It’s not just cricket, you know. Plus: great commentators, the Murray family, and a question of cycling etiquette

Plus: More tips for surviving the Caledonian Sleeper; and how to save your ceramic umbrella stand

I don’t mind, though. It’s just the déshabillé of the perfectly emancipated Englishwoman

(And that’s why some astronomers pronounce it with a soft ‘sh’, not a hard ‘ch’)