Sensibly, the late Barry Humphries allowed the political leanings of himself and his alter-egos to remain camouflaged within their biting…

Anthony Albanese and his acolytes have been cock-a hoop over the Solicitor-General’s opinion on the Voice. They are ecstatic that…

Major problems with the Voice referendum are plain to see: even some of its prominent supporters question its chances of…

Welcoming me to my own country is frankly bizarre

But it’s a tight competition

Charles, Christianity and multiculturalism

Is this the way the vaccines end?

Ode to The Speccie

Part One. The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1971) The first Barry McKenzie film was, as everyone knows, based on a…

On the wit and wisdom of Barry Humphries

It is true to say that memories of the departed become much more vivid when they are gone – more…

How Labour’s centrists took back control

Dutch farmers have won a battle. But can they win the war?

The battle for the soul of Italy

The rise of America’s Satanists

Michio Kaku on the new world of quantum computing

The terrible choice facing Russia’s opposition

The fiasco in Khartoum is being widely interpreted as a tragic failure of intelligence. James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, is…

One of the best ways to work out that somebody has not thought deeply about anti-Semitism is if they say…

I thought I had forgotten about Diane Abbott, but in fact there has been a Diane-sized hole in my life…

‘Democracy,’ said H.L. Mencken, ‘is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.’ As we approach 2024, America…

I was having tea with my neighbour in her second-floor flat when a man, a stranger, appeared in the room.…

Growing up in New England, in a town simmering with menace, Ruthie suffers the agonies of parental neglect

Aged 14, Hadley Freeman succumbed to it, and was offered many conflicting explanations. She herself finally attributes it to a fear of approaching womanhood

Ian Buruma describes three individuals who saved themselves in wartime by betraying others. But none was a ‘typical traitor’, or essentially different from the rest of us

Vuillard’s powerful novel analyses the French army’s humiliation in 1954 at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, and the motivations of the principal players

Rainer Werner Fassbinder made 43 highly original films, and was planning another when he died – at the same age, and in the same way, as his idol

Their winning formula has been to present themselves as the party of patriotism and economic competence, while stealing the opposition’s clothes whenever it suited them

Katty Baird braves the cliffs and wind-blasted moors of East Lothian to identify as many species of these maligned insects as possible

Central Europe has shaped our history for centuries – but will the West always find it baffling, wonders Peter Frankopan

Is it being a dominion country, a well-heeled colony, that makes this country good at comedy? The death of Barry…

I was making my way slowly through one of my dismally prosaic little to-do lists – ‘pay the water bill’…

Tetris is a righteously entertaining movie about the stampede to secure the rights from within the Soviet Union to what…

Once upon a time, rock bands wished for nothing more than to look as though they posed a clear and…

In July 1928, an unknown Swedish woman artist mounted a solo show of her revolutionary abstract paintings at the World…

Snowflakes, an excellent title, rehashes The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. A guest in a hotel room is visited by…

Plus: a striking production of an operatic dud at ENO

Yes, yes, I know. You’ve had your fill of David Attenborough’s jeremiads, you’ve heard enough already about climate change catastrophe.…

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is an excellent adaptation of Rachel Joyce’s bestselling novel (2012) about a retired old…

Robert Gore-Langton on John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s fraught, botched, triumphant Hamlet

One of the few survivors of Gough Whitlam’s Camelot, that legendary cultural icon  and eminent Australian diplomat, Sir Les Patterson,…

The word ‘mulligan’ is new to me – but golfers everywhere will find it familiar. In golf a ‘mulligan’ is…

My mother, a Yorkshire woman, would occasionally take shortcuts in the kitchen, but not when it came to a roast,…

Lady Bamford’s Cotswold fairy-land Daylesford Farm has sprouted leaves. It is no longer a farm shop, which should be a…

What’s not to love about David de Gea? Manchester United’s goalkeeper might appear to have it all: a humongous salary,…

I was one of the first people to take up Elon Musk’s offer to purchase a blue tick, the Twitter…

In Competition No. 3296, you were invited to provide a poem whose rhyme words are all at least three syllables.…

After a day’s house-hunting in West Cork, I texted the builder boyfriend to say that we were too late. The…

Monday morning. In comes Frank. Frank is a carer in his late fifties. He comes daily to wash me. Still…

New York The most likely place to be injured, or even killed, in the Bagel is the sidewalk, any sidewalk,…