News that the Biden administration – clearly the most inept group of individuals ever to take up residency in 1600…

The new greek chorus: where are the feminists? As a woman of a certain age, it saddens me greatly to…

Why the world is becoming increasingly wary of Xi Jinping’s China

Covid is stripping us of our freedoms. Who will stop it?

Our politicians are allowing the biggest erosion of civil liberties in two centuries

Australia plugs for a land carbon sink

The new gold standard in wasteful spending

The latest mysterious outbreak - telling the truth

My life in Afghanistan

It’s nearly 50 years since the world’s greatest ‘woke’ anthem was released. But who’s listening to it now?

It’s in his nature

The government’s social care reform plans are all wrong

The fight for the future of the Church of England

The rise of the secular godparent

Jules Léotard was blessed in his name. It might have been quite different had he been called, say, Jules Droupé.…

The Defence Secretary on Afghanistan and the questions facing the West

In London for the first time in 18 months, I was as excited as a child on a birthday outing.…

Technology is robbing us of the power to forget

How pets became the national priority

Home Britain brought its last troops home from Afghanistan, having flown out more than 15,000 people since 14 August; but…

A glimmer of hope Sir: After the debacle of the West’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was comforting to read…

Nye Bevan famously said that he was only able to persuade family doctors to support the creation of the NHS…

Escape velocity The evacuation of Afghanistan was likened to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. What were the…

In the 18th century, art historians’ admiration for the beauty of white-ish ancient Greek marble statuary led people to draw…

I have no personal investment in America’s Afghanistan war. My own service in Vietnam, now a half-century in the past,…

This is getting serious. Never mind global shortages of microchips, plastics, copper and container ships; now we’re running out of…

The end of summer 2021, the end of the great British staycation. I sat on the grass outside the post…

Nearly two years on from the general election and 11 years since the Tories took office, they remain comfortably and…

From time to time, people get worried and ask one another: ‘Is the world falling apart?’ I imagine this is…

It was quite the handover at Kabul airport this week. The last American troops to exit Afghanistan reportedly left facing…

I suspect that there are no people in the world quite so right-on as the Nobel prize committee members. A…

What are myths for? Do they lend meaning and value to this quintessence of dust? Like religion, perhaps they help…

When Catherine Dior, one of the heroic French Resistance workers captured by the Nazis, came face to face with her…

The final volume of Peter Ackroyd’s History of England feels like a dutiful exercise carried out in a hurry, says Philip Hensher

We tend to think of turning points as single moments of change — Saul on the road to Damascus or…

I can’t recall reading an angrier book than this. Richard Beard has written what I hope for his sake is…

In Geoffrey Household’s adrenalin-quickening 1939 thriller Rogue Male, a lone English adventurer takes a potshot at Hitler and then runs…

In May 2019, the first World of Bob Dylan conference was held in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Why Tulsa? Because Dylan’s archives…

To write about London and its rivers is to enter a crowded literary field. Many aspects of watery life in…

The vast majority of the British public, and even military historians, have never heard of them. COPPists — a combination…

It was only in 1948 that the term WASP was coined — by a Florida folklorist, Stetson Kennedy. Yet White…

The endless news is of shows locked down as every form of life is locked down in a nation struggling…

Grade: C– The nicest thing one can say is that this is a marginally better album than we would have…

Every now and then, you see a new series — Succession, say, or Chernobyl or To the Lake — which…

As August unwound, the EIF settled into the cavernous gazebo that is Edinburgh Park, and things began to loosen up.…

Leos Carax is the director whose films have always been wilfully odd. Ron and Russell Mael (the brothers from the…

For some reason, I’d got it into my head that the main work in the Gringolts Quartet’s midday recital at…

It’s a rum beast the new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Cinderella is set in Belleville, a European city of 18th-century…

Laura Gascoigne on the art of pillboxes

As a child in Budapest, I heard my grandfather tell the family around the Sunday lunch table to beware the…

You’ve often come across the charge that ABC news and current affairs programs are being made by ‘activists’ rather than…

Gstaad   Good manners aside, what I miss nowadays is a new, intelligent, finely acted movie. Never have I seen…

A Sandown Saturday proved the perfect send-off for 12 raceless days on the otherwise wonderful Isle of Mull. A Frankie…

Not long after Catriona and I first met, her husband painted my head and shoulders portrait in oils as I…

It’s not often that bridge makes headlines, but last week something extraordinary happened. At the online European Qualifier for the…

We began searching for the farm of our dreams in Wales as we planned our escape from Surrey. The problem…

I was pleased to see pictures of Michael Gove at a nightclub in Aberdeen last weekend. According to press reports,…

Forgive the personal question, but how long does it take you to, you know, go to the gents, ladies, non-binary?…

Q. We have had some rather rich Argentines to stay. No one was able to come in to help before…

A French creole restaurant rises in the sullen ruins of London. It is called Louie, for French king or trumpeter,…

‘This crossword is problematic!’ exclaimed my husband, tossing aside the folded newspaper marked with a ring where his whisky glass…

A popular conceit among chess authors, particularly dead ones, is to describe a fine game as the execution of a…

In Competition No. 3214, you were invited to choose a well-known painted portrait and let the subject speak for itself,…

The unclued lights can all be preceded by OLD which is the clued solution at 49 Across. ‘Crocks’ at 5…

White to play. Swiercz–Xiong, Sinquefield Cup 2021. 1 Kxb2 allows a perpetual check. But forcing an exchange of queens would…

The unclued lights (one hyphened) have nothing in common.   Across 4Author Henry’s daughter perhaps (not a son) making a…