Finally, it would appear, we are beginning an honest conversation about the assimilation of Islamic cultures into mainstream Australia. This…

Wharfies beware: Chris Corrigan is back

St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral is a Melbourne landmark. Opposite Flinders Street station, it marks the entry to the city from…

On the anniversary of the Dismissal, Whitlam’s legacy remains deeply flawed

Liberals are learning they may have to fight for what they believe in

Self-righteous Westerners and Israel-hating Jews are playing a deadly role

A one-eyed satirical view from the Point Piper undergrowth Oh dearie me. As the media from here to Widgiemooltha nauseatingly…

Truvada could reduce new HIV infections to zero – if the puritanical health establishment went for it

His scattershot reforms and wild statements make him look out of control to ordinary conservative Catholics

‘There’s a moment happening’ on transgender issues. But it’s not as new as it looks

Military insiders reckon we’ve lost a third of our capabilities in the last five years. What will Cameron do about that?

Having just been on the receiving end of one, I can now see them for the clever conversational gambit that they are

This fair, just, brave man deserves the simple justice of the presumption of innocence.

Watching the first snowflakes fall on a cobbled square filled with twinkling lights will chase away all festive cynicism

Rising carbon emissions are not a sign of western excess, but the result of the huge reduction in world poverty

Home The all-party Foreign Affairs Committee urged David Cameron, the Prime Minister, not to press ahead with a Commons vote…

Plus: Percy’s secret birthday party; the golden age of Hollywood; and a cameo in the new Ab Fab movie

Plus: expectations of driverless cars; drugs and porn; celebrity clothes at auction

Requiring sponsors is not a new idea – it was happening in Aristotle’s time

In a wholly unforeseen manner the King has suffered like any of his soldiers from the risks of the campaign

Plus: saving the elephant; what to do about Corbyn; 40 is an issue for everyone; Ingrams on Frost

Cameron will not risk another humiliating defeat and the numbers simply don’t add up

Plus: the house that Jacques built; ministers cannot comply with international law; more on Prof Sir Geoff Palmer; and cosmetic surgery

The poisonous emails, the threats, the rage – it’s all rooted in our crude attitude to psychiatric suffering

Come to that, I wish all luvvies would just shut up and do what they’re supposed to do – in other words, act

Plus: Standard Chartered; Britain in the Prosperity Index; and does any bank really help small businesses?

Philip Hensher’s two-volume anthology is bigger and broader than anything else available — and handsome enough to hang on the wall

The sour yellow miasma forever (wrongly) associated with Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper had been poisoning the capital for centuries, according to Christine Corton’s London Fog

Steinem deserves universal recognition, but Life on the Road, her often stirring memoir, focuses too narrowly on the USA

It is hard to tell who knows what in Numero Zero, Eco’s deliberately confusing novel about blackmail, Musssolini’s double and an imaginary newspaper carrying yesterday’s news

Karl Ludvigsen describes how the engineering genius became a father-figure to Hitler and armed the Third Reich without really being a Nazi

New crime fiction from Sophie Hannah, Christian Schünemann and Jelena Volic, John Niven and F.H. Batacan

Home is Burning — a son’s tormented memoir of coming to terms with his father’s terminal illness — is crude, obscene, haunting, and very good

Schiff has immersed herself so deeply in the 1692 witch trials that the innocent victims of mass hysteria actually appear to be guilty in some way

Six books published to mark Sinatra’s centenary agree that he was a legend — but wasn’t that desire, passion, despair and heartache always a bit adolescent?

Naomi Williams’s novel Landfalls skilfully recreates Lapérouse’s ill-fated 1785 expedition of discovery, which vanished without trace

There’s a curious thing about the bowling green in my Suffolk village. The footpath running alongside it is on a…

Max Hastings’s Secret War concludes that most secret agents aren’t effective; but Paddy Hayes finds a fantastic heroine in Daphne Park, Queen of Spies

Between the defeat of the government of Digby Denham in 1915 and the election of Campbell Newman in 2012, Queensland…

Juan Holzmann goes underground in Minsk with the Belarus Free Theatre on the eve of their London festival, Staging a Revolution

As does British abstract painter John Hoyland, who’s enjoying a revival courtesy of Damien Hirst’s beautiful new gallery on Newport Street

Plus: Janet Suzman’s Marriage of Figaro for Royal Academy Opera is full of divine and sexy detail

Plus: a bold and unusual Old Vic production of an early Eugene O’Neill that zips past in 90 minutes

The Royal Ballet’s other programme, Connectome/Raven Girl, shows that Wayne MacGregor is no better a storyteller than Acosta

This is a film to enter your heart and your bones. And there’s not an Aston Martin in sight

The Tallis Scholars have performed on every continent on the planet except one. Founder Peter Phillips wishes to correct this

Plus: Stephen King threatens BBC 6 Music listeners with the Bee Gees

Plus: a slow-motion version of the 2012 Olympics from Dominic Sandbrook in BBC2's Let Us Entertain You

Melbourne opera-goers are in for a surprise: a production of a masterpiece, set in an appropriate period with naturalistic sets…

Swimming-pools, gyms, boat tow-away zones? Nurse, help!

Going dancing in Exmouth

It’s time for my annual fleecing at the hands of the vet

The Southern city is recovering from its recent hardships – but it’s not all plain sailing

Congratulations to my old pal Lou Hobhouse, who has just been appointed the new editor of the English Bridge Union…

The two great Soviet world champion Russians, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov, have almost always taken divergent paths. Karpov was…

White to play. This is from Kasparov-Karpov, London/Leningrad (Game 16). Kasparov saw this conclusion many moves in advance. White would…

In Competition No. 2922 you were invited to invent new garments and provide definitions. Thanks to the reader who, inspired…

This week’s puzzle breaks away from the traditional thematic puzzle. Instead, here is an alphabetical jigsaw for solvers to tackle.…

The unclued lights are CHEESES. First prize M. Taylor, Eskbank, Midlothian Runners-up D.G. Page, Orpington, Kent; Katherine Griffin, Winchester, Hants

We all try to improve our children’s life chances but how they turn out is mostly in their genes

He observed that human groups that have developed favourable moral habits are the ones that succeed

Plus: young women who streak their hair grey; and new neighbours who try to poach your home help

I tried to persuade his mother that it is unhealthy for girls who have recently foaled to drink first-growth claret

The history of a tendentious word