Decisiveness. Perseverance. Effectiveness. These are the three key words being bandied around by the world’s top diplomats to describe Australian…

Being an insomniac, I woke about 4 a.m. last Friday, turned on the BBC and there was the news already,…

At first Moscow dubbed ‘unacceptable’ Tony Abbott’s brief speeches in Parliament and elsewhere on the downing of the Malaysian airliner…

It’s now six months since I was diagnosed with cancer. That was a terrible start to the year. The surgeon…

After years of arguments, days of negotiations and hours of speeches from the Greens, the carbon tax was finally abolished.…

For social workers, the age of entitlement survives

If only European leaders were more like Tony Abbott

Peter Oborne’s masterly new book on cricket recalls a special Test rivalry between Australia and Pakistan

No one will thank you for talking about it, but in the world's QE-happy stock markets, indicators are flashing red

A considered response to the tragedy of Flight MH17 could start to undo a quarter-century of failed policy

His answer to the destruction of Flight MH17 has been more propaganda.In Russia, at least, it seems to be working

People who wear shades all the time seem to radiate disdain

The old paths to the top for working-class children – sport, music, acting, writing – are increasingly closed

There are two kinds of foreign recruit to Isis: the ‘gangsters’ and the true believers

A Swiss town where the only bad thing is the exchange rate

Plus: Patriotism and the Commonwealth Games

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told Parliament that President Vladimir Putin of Russia should end his country’s support for…

I’ve seen Roger Federer, Fu Mingxia, Michael Johnson, Dancing Brave, Ayrton Senna, Katarina Witt and Malcolm Marshall

Plus: air safety, and guessing Tony Blair’s wealth

The essayist was ahead of us on the seduction of distractions

Give the women a chance Sir: Melissa Kite’s article about the reshuffle seems downright unfair (‘A misogynistic reshuffle’, 19 July). Whatever…

When ex-ministers immediately quit the Commons, a vital resource is lost

Plus: The reshuffle muddle gets deeper, the BBC's Israel problem, and Parliament's crisis of legitimacy

Pardoning those convicted under laws we now disagree with is an irrational surrender to the emotional tide

Feeling sweaty? Take some tips from The Go-Between

Plus: A golden generation of British car executives, sympathy for Tony O’Reilly, and good news amid Tesco’s woes

A review of A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by James Hamilton. A brilliant account of learning, or failing, to survive in a market of extraordinary brutality

A review of John Wayne: The Life and Legend, by Scott Eyman. It borders on hagiography but for Wayne fans that’s no flaw

A review of Noontide Toll, by Romesh Gunesekera. One of the most delicate contemporary prose stylists tackles one of the most intractable conflicts

A review of The Last Victorians, by W. Sydney Robinson. Ignore the misleading blurb and revel in the research, writing and bizarre characters in this portrait of four 20th-century eccentrics

A review of Of Green Leaf, Bird and Flower, by Elizabeth R. Fairman. The images are mostly astounding but the essays are a mixed bag

A review of The Ape Has Stabbed Me: A Cocktail of Reminiscence, by Vincent Poklewski Koziell. A hilarious tale of hats, hous­es, drinks and direc­torships

A review of The Reckoning, by Rennie Airth, a thriller that leaves your nerves unshredded but thoughts haunted

A review of The Greatest Comeback: How Richard Nixon Rose from Defeat to Create the New Majority, by Patrick J. Buchanan. Tricky Dicky’s time in the wilderness was key to his success

A review of Edmund de Waal, by A.S. Byatt, Colm Toibin, Peter Carey, Emma Crichton Miller and others. A book of discursive essays, short stories and photographs that explores the potter’s many paths and influences

It’s surely a fancy, the conviction that my first memory of newspapering came as a three-year-old, but I swear the…

Sir Neville Marriner, 90, Sir Roger Norrington, 80, and Sir Andrew Davis, 70, on the secrets of growing old very gracefully

It’s one of three cracking new summer DVD releases

The Royal Ballet principal on her new showcase, Solo for Two

Plus: the first professional production of Noel Coward’s banned This Was A Man is a real find

We will not see the like of this vast and impressive exhibition again during our lifetimes – but it's far from an easy, populist show

Plus: Opera Holland Park’s Norma is clunkiness personified

Anne Reid and Brian Cox can’t rescue this pile-up of clichés, easy sentiment and predictable plot twists

... and demands the return of Dad’s Army

If the BBC decides it does, there’s no better model than Radio 4’s current chief Gwyneth Williams

Depictions of the poet were ubiquitous in the 18th century. The finest have now been brought together for a show at Waddesdon Manor

On victimhood, endurance and stoicism

A whole day of family time. How to spend it?

Poor ants, trapped by a socially enterprising visionary blissed out on Lottery funding

Like the prisoners released from their dungeons at the end of Fidelio, they came blinking into the sunlight

'I always worked for trainers who had good horses, Group One horses'

Richard Selway was one of the first friends I made in the bridge world. Long-standing ‘host’ at TGR’s, he was…

The ever reliable Steve Giddins has just published a new book on that great strategist Aron Nimzowitsch. This is the…

White to play. This is from Storey–Jarmany, -British Championship, Aberystwyth 2014. White’s position is overwhelming but what is the quickest…

In Competition No. 2857 you were invited to take the first line of Leigh Hunt’s mini rondeau ‘Jenny Kissed me’,…

In June we lost a popular 40. Clockwise round the grid from 3 run the titles of two of his…

The grid represents Germany, with six bordering countries round the edge, and four cities in the interior, positioned roughly appropriately…

Since I set up the West London Free School, I've been a much less hands-on parent

This country does not produce footballers of the first rank

Plus: A plan to dispose of an unwanted portrait

Chatsworth's marketing is the most duplicitous and effective I have ever known

Apparently, it means you should have the right to die – but not the right to climb a ladder without permission