Oh, what a difference a week makes! As Australia reaches a tipping point in the number of people vaccinated –…

Make Australia adult again

The fall of Kabul was predicted. By me.

It’s a nightmare on Pennsylvania Ave

Is the English language really so ‘oppressive’?

Those of us praising the NSW Libs were wrong

Covid has crippled a once-noble profession

America’s reputation is falling faster than the bodies dropping from the under-carriages

Why are our premiers behaving like marauding mullahs?

The 46th President is unworthy of the office

The migration of European eels is one of the miracles of nature. They start life in the great deeps of…

Is Israel facing a fourth wave?

My post-viral battle

The Sandhurst graduate taking on the Taliban

Dismantling the environmental theory for Covid’s origins

The truth about male ‘competitiveness’

Can the CCP control China’s harassment scandals?

I’m one of the stranded expats

Australia’s zero-Covid policy has become a trap

Home At the virtual G7 emergency summit that he was chairing, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, urged President Joe Biden…

The blame game Sir: Like many who served in Afghanistan, I have watched with growing dismay the recent events unfolding…

The concept of normality has been so disrupted over the past 18 months that the Extinction Rebellion protests — usually…

I’ve been to two of my favourite book festivals recently, Chalke Valley History Festival and Charleston, and the experience has…

Birth of the Paralympics While Athens can claim to be the home city of the Olympic Games, the Paralympics can…

‘No one is stupid enough to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury…

The Afghans the Home Office is scrambling to resettle in Britain present one of immigration’s most sympathetic cases: translators and…

This time last year, Boris Johnson and his team were making plans to ‘move on’ from the pandemic. He had…

The Hundred — some sort of pimped-up cricket tournament, I gather — passed me by entirely, but I’ve been admiring…

The Americans may have pulled out, but luckily the Afghans have the world’s vibrant community of witches intervening to save…

This week, the media pressure was on the British government to extend the deadline for the evacuations from Kabul airport.…

It was a hot late evening on the Greek island of Tinos, and we were sitting at a quayside restaurant…

Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of the Australian newspaper, is best known for his shrewd analysis of our country and…

No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles…

There was certainly no shortage of excellent advice about war in Afghanistan offered to many American leaders by many people over many years, says Justin Marozzi

Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Jock, a Scottish priest, rang in shock. Two priest friends, David and Norman, had been…

When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of…

In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim,…

Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps…

‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…

Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…

One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…

Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…

And, as even Canberra locks down, so do all the shows. The Melbourne Theatre Company shuts down its production of…

The new Lily Allen vehicle opens in a spruced-up terrace in the East End. Allen plays a self-satisfied yuppie, Jenny,…

Great Swiss artists, like famous Belgians, might seem to be an amusingly underpopulated category. Actually, as with celebrated Flemings and…

Our occasional series on cinema’s most underrated films arrives at what many have considered the peak of misogynistic trash. We’re…

When it comes to history programming, television’s loss is increasingly audio’s gain. People moan to me most weeks over the…

Opera buffs enjoy their jargon. We all do it, scattering words like ‘spinto’ and ‘Fach’ like an enthusiastic pizza waiter…

This year we must love Edinburgh for her soul rather than her looks. The EIF should be commended for making…

Lloyd Evans talks to Nigel Planer about the death of comedy theatre — and how he’s trying to revive it

We now know that Boris Johnson’s initial reluctance to impose Covid containment regulations was prompted by a confidential January 2020…

TV host Paul Murray spoke on Sky News Australia about the role the word ‘misinformation’ is currently playing in the…

Black to play. Geller–Sveshnikov, USSR Ch 1978. Geller’s last move, 34 Rb1-e1 looked clever, since Black cannot safely capture the…

In Competition No. 3213 you were invited to submit a villanelle whose first line is: ‘The art of [insert gerund…

Unclued lights can be arranged so that, preceded by ‘What is’, they form a question whose answer solvers must shade.…

Given how difficult it is to arrange an overseas holiday, I thought I’d take Charlie and Freddie, my two youngest,…

There be dragons! What we now call the Sveshnikov variation of the Sicilian defence was, in the 1970s, largely uncharted…

Q. What is the best seating plan when you have a supper party where you are hoping to matchmake two…

I sometimes wander through Trafalgar Square in the small hours when the traffic has abated and children are no longer…

Language is used in a weird way in the victimhood war, where those who see themselves without agency bravely speak…

Gstaad When Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter discovered the French Riviera as a summer resort during the early 1920s, the…

I have been on holiday for two weeks. Well, not quite. You see, a bloke I once met told me…

Malindi, Kenya Beneath the Indian Ocean’s surface, I wondered if the pandemic had turned out to be a good thing…

At Gatwick airport, after an hour and 15 minutes in a snaking queue system apparently purposely designed to infect as…

The letter arrived in a hand-addressed envelope, inside of which was a handwritten note. After everything we have been through,…

So, face-to-face bridge is slowly returning, with EBU’s Summer Meeting in Eastbourne being one of the first to take place.…

As suggested by 11A, other unclued lights were all anagrams of ducks: 12A drake; 16A teal; 28A redhead; 31A smew; …