As we pointed out last week, if the Liberals wish to win the next election they can do so easily.…

Sensible centre is for suckers   I am going to point to the US, the UK and modern mainstream protestant…

I am indebted to the public-spirited citizen who sent me the charter drawn up by Male Champions of Change and…

It was a somewhat surreal experience to be standing with my partner and two children in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square,…

For those of us who exist long enough it is all too easy to live on somehow through decades of…

Rosehill: democracy reborn   The Rosehill Convention of the NSW Liberal Party may go down in history as the beginning…

As Adam Smith once observed, in most nations there’s often a lot of ruin. His point was that it takes…

A state division of the Liberal Party will have a State Conference on 2-3 September 2017 to debate the introduction…

‘What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you,’ Virginia Woolf composed in…

The South Downs cover 260 sq miles from Hampshire’s Itchen Valley to Eastbourne in East Sussex. Nestled near the southernmost…

Sir James Dyson would make a good therapist for anxious Brexiteers. Everything about him is comfortingly precise — his manner…

 Kiev There is no lavatory paper to be found in government buildings in Kiev. Plan ahead, locals advise, if you…

The credit for decriminalising male homosexuality in 1967 — for those over 21 in England and Wales at least —…

It’s exactly 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised male homosexuality, received the Royal Assent on 27…

Twenty years in August since Diana died. The anniversary is sad for me on many levels — she was definitely…

The French president’s embarrassing attempts to reinvent himself as the new Tony Blair are not working

Besides being important in themselves, the trade talks between Britain and the United States which began this week are symbolic…

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, invited the media to take a photograph of her beginning a holiday with her…

As pictures go, it could be career death. An amazing young talent caught in a compromising position with two older…

But me no butts Boris Johnson, being taught a Maori head-to-head greeting, joked that it might be ‘misinterpreted in a…

Public health specialist Sir Michael Marmot has blamed ‘the cuts’ for the rise in dementia among the elderly, resulting in…

Bugs bite back Sir: Matthew Parris is quite right to say that we Leavers would prefer independence in reduced circumstances…

It’s summertime and the living is easy… unless you’re a civil servant working on Brexit. Whitehall has recognised that the…

Never meet your enemies — you might like them, and that ruins stuff. I had dinner with the former Archbishop…

The pre-commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales is already in full swing. She…

It came as no great surprise to learn that the EU competition authorities are crawling all over the three major…

I’ve had it with the Conservatives. For me, and I know I’m not the only one, the final straw was…

At a party earlier this summer, I was chatting to a man who asked me how I voted in last…

The language of diplomacy often requires nuance and subtlety. Not infrequently, it needs to be opaque, to enable differing interpretations;…

‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…

The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying…

It’s the constant dilemma of the pop science author: how to write something flashy enough to grab readers, but solid…

Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who…

What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…

One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out…

In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…

We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture…

George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne…

Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of…

The Edinburgh Festival was founded as a response to war. The inaugural event, held in 1947, was the brainchild of…

On his deathbed in 1904, George Frederic Watts saw a extraordinary spectacle. He witnessed the universe coming into being: the…

When brass instruments with button-operated valves were introduced in the second half of the 19th century, music-making changed. Once requiring…

Two programmes this week presented two radically different world views, or rather ways of life. Aditya Chakrabortty’s series for Radio…

As you may have spotted, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of male homosexuality with an…

When you first encounter it, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis can sound like the Ninth Symphony with more singing but no tunes.…

The strings sweep upwards, the horns surge, and Leoncavallo’s Zaza throws itself into your arms. We don’t know it yet,…

Oliver Cotton is an RSC stalwart who looks like a man born to greatness. Google him. He has the fearless…

A co-production by MTC and STC of a new play which has been acclaimed in Paris, London and New York…

The Big Sick is a rom-com that’s smarter than most rom-coms, which isn’t saying much, admittedly. It stars a Muslim…

This is a great time to be a bridge professional — not just for the world’s top players, who have…

This year’s British Championship starts on Saturday and is endowed with an outstanding prize fund supplied by Capital Developments Waterloo…

White to play. This position is from McShane-Istratescu, London 2013. How did White conclude his kingside attack with a fine…

In Competition No. 3008 you were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the…

The answer to the subtraction sum in the title is 1947. So all the unclued lights are celebrities who celebrate…

Q. My children are very lucky in that we have bought them all flats. However, they are now renting out…

‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported…

Kenya   We are on the beach, where our home is full of dystopian stories. My daughter Eve is whizzing…

Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of…

Insufficient attention has been paid to the history of naughty girls, who deployed allure to prosper in a male-dominated world.…

Greece   I am surfing along the Cycladic islands on Puritan, a 125ft classic that was launched in 1929 by…

‘We are always waiting for somebody,’ observed a vexed British journalist. Usually it was me they were waiting for, but…

Quite stoically, I was mountaineering on my hands and knees over a sea of rubble to get to the temporary…

For our 16th wedding anniversary, Caroline and I went to the Almeida Theatre to see Ink, a new play about…

The unclued Across lights become thematic when a suffix is appended. The individual unclued Down lights (one a proper noun)…