It’s wonderful that so many freedom fighters and free speech advocates are making a point of visiting our shores this…

The Albanese government is paralysed by domestic politics

Jimbo’s policy mistakes keep accumulating

The NDIS is a financial disaster

Australians were duped during Covid

Did his persecution lead to the rise of the biomedical state?

Xi is in for a major jolt

A great week for conservatives

The writing is on the wall for the Bidens

Judges don’t even understand schoolchild science

The Greek tragedy that is our education system

According to my phone, I’m in Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport. Except I’m not. The Israel Defence Forces have scrambled the…

I’m writing this in my car, laptop on knees and a delicious can of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and…

Good Friday, 2021, at Jesus House For All Nations church in Brent, north-west London. Face masked, head bowed, hands clasped,…

It won’t be much comfort to Rishi Sunak, but he’s not the only world leader being put to the electoral…

The electoral turmoil in France threatens its status as a world power. Friendly nations are despairing; rivals and enemies are…

At rallies, Joe Biden often speaks after his wife. ‘My name is Joe Biden and I’m Jill’s husband,’ he begins.…

When I was a small child, my mother left me in the charge of an elderly neighbour so that she…

All sorts of people are grateful to Peter Magyar for bounding into the arena of Hungarian public life. Journalists, chiefly.…

It would make a pleasant change if every elected MP was to make it their ambition to be honestus, Latin…

There was hardly an election poster to be seen on the roadside during a two-hour drive from London to the…

Never has an opposition leader with ratings as dismal as Keir Starmer’s gone on to win an election. In any…

Back to 1976? Sir: Your leading article perfectly reflects the public’s attitude to the manifestos of the major parties (‘Challenging…

The dullest assertion you can make about Donald Trump is that he’s a narcissist who has no interest in the…

I was amused the other week to read George Osborne’s Diary in this magazine. In it the man now in…

‘I drink champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad,’ Madame Lily Bollinger (1899-1977) remarked. ‘Sometimes I drink it when…

Memorably sweeping statements tripping easily from the tongue have a habit of worming their way into assumptions we make and…

Outside a café on the outskirts of Reading, Rachel Reeves is listening to the concerns of small-business owners. ‘Something that…

I feel as if I first took part in a general election even before I was born. My father was…

I have never been a contributor to Twitter, partly because my comments would not be subjected to the intensive hygiene…

They are quite unlike any other sonnet sequence of the time and seem to be a kind of personal statement – written by a man with undeniable feelings for another man

When 16-year-old Tommo moves to an elite, brutish boarding school, he longs to fit in and even manages to join the inner circle. But can he ever really become ‘one of them’?

Alain Corbin describes how rest, once seen as a prelude to eternal life, began to assume a therapeutic quality in the 19th century, as a guard against burnout and a cure for TB

Imperial feasts in the 18th century would last several days – and it was considered the height of bad manners not to gorge on the variety of meat and fish on offer

Vladimir Pereverzin’s ‘crime’ was to have worked for a company owned by Mikhail Khodorkovsky – and refusing to give false evidence resulted in an 11-year sentence in the camps

US bailouts keep this poor relation afloat through bankruptcies, hurricanes and political bust-ups without even trying to boost its demographics or reverse its economic decline

The fearless breed, descended from the Molossus of Epirus described by Aristotle, may soon disappear from Central Europe, along with the flocks it guards

The Bulgarian dissident sailed too close to the wind with his revelations about Tudor Zhivkov in 1978, provoking the dictator to enlist Russian help in eliminating him

A 19th-century missionary’s daughter falls for a Sami herdsman and flees with him to the tundra – only to find that, as an incomer, she will always be cold-shouldered

A once fashionable YBA now scraping a living in America meets old friends by chance, prompting a deep dive into memory

Jen Hadfield is not only spellbound by the moods of the ocean and the hectic weather but by the Shaetlan dialect itself – which ‘struck me immediately as a poetic language’

The new documentary I Am: Celine Dion which just started on Amazon Prime Video and in cinemas begins with Maria…

A classic opera production ages like wine. When David McVicar’s staging of Handel’s Giulio Cesare first opened at Glyndebourne in…

The Nature of Love is a French-Canadian film about an academic who considers herself happily married but then encounters a…

For those of us with a poor grasp of time, who can still recall when a night at the pub…

The Bear has been called ‘the most stressful thing on TV’ and I think that’s probably a fair description. It’s…

You could be forgiven for assuming that the citizens of Paris weren’t exactly bursting with joy at the prospect of…

In 1916 the Bank of England committed what Nikolaus Pevsner was to call the greatest architectural crime to befall London…

It is always interesting to observe the ways in which pop stars try to negotiate first growing up, and then…

There’s yet to be a Glastonbury line-up that hasn’t provoked a chorus of naysaying. Refrains like ‘looks rubbish. I wouldn’t…

Yosser Hughes is regarded as a national treasure. He first appeared in 1982 in Alan Bleasdale’s TV drama, Boys from…

For most of China’s 1.4 billion population, 2024 has been the Year of the Dragon, which makes it, according to…

I’ve been searching through the language used to describe the train wreck of a presidential debate between Joe Biden and…

Graham Norton’s latest novel ‘blends dark humour and emotional weight with ease’, says the Radio Times. That may well be,…

Q. Often at parties strangers bear down on me looking excited and are then offended when I don’t recognise them.…

An old friend phoned. Normally cheerful, he was fed up. One of his business partners was being more than usually…

People sometimes ask me why I don’t go into politics. Why on earth would I do that? No, if you…

Provence Summer has arrived. The evenings are warm enough to sit out on the balcony terrace and watch the lights…

Douglas Is Cancelled, the new drama series on ITV, should come with a trigger warning – for me, anyway. Watching…

Nairobi, Kenya Parliament and City Hall were burning under great columns of smoke and clouds of tear gas hung over…

You need a personal public service number to get married in Ireland, but in order to get one, you need…