New Year is a time for resolutions and for reflecting on the year passed. After the last two years of…

The NSW premier is a conviction politician who leads by example

Wait and fume

The tennis champ is chipping away at the mad mandates

We need to return to empirical evidence

Our Peronist Pope likes to keep his prelates guessing

Environmental propaganda is bad news for poor farmers

A professor of law’s New Year’s Eve wish

Learning to live with climate change

Does Morrison want to lose? Does Scott Morrison plan to lose the election? Alienating Coalition rank-and-file by his surrender on…

What would Macron’s second term look like?

The exhausting battle to keep on the right side of the CCP

The case for vaccine passports has collapsed

Why I love to be hated

My wife and I were lucky to escape for a long-delayed birdwatching holiday in Kenya over Christmas. To have been…

Anglicans need to agree to disagree

The antivirals taskforce is at the ready

An alternative to Sage’s worst-case scenario

After taking James Bond hostage, Auric Goldfinger does what all Bond villains do when in a position of power —…

Two and a half years into his premiership, Boris Johnson has enjoyed no more than a month of that time…

More than 200 non-US residents stood in the queue ahead of me. A grand total of four Homeland Security officers…

Saturnalia was a period of Roman fun and games held just before our Christmas. Macrobius (c. ad 430) composed a…

Waiting for the gong Tony Blair was knighted, 14 years after leaving Downing Street. How long have other ex-PMs had…

Welcome changes Sir: Lloyd Evans’s sympathetic piece on the fate of Afghans once they arrive in the UK made for…

Home The warmest New Year’s Day on record saw a temperature of 16.3˚C (61.3˚F) in St James’s Park, London. A…

The headline looked promising: ‘How to argue with a Covid anti-vaxxer.’ And, yes, a Times colleague had put together a…

What does the new year have in store for consumers — and families trying to make ends meet? A stumbling…

Typically for my generation, I woke repeatedly as a kid with my pyjamas soaked in sweat because I’d had yet…

If anyone had any doubts about the wisdom of tempting fate then they probably haven’t considered the case of Betty…

We are considering privatising or selling off our dog, Jessie. She seemed a rather wonderful idea when we got her…

In recent years, the notion of cabinet government has been a polite fiction. In theory, the prime minister is merely…

From Ladybird’s The Story of Music (a dinky 50 pages, generously illustrated) to Richard Taruskin’s five-volume epic The Oxford History…

Professor David Damrosch, the director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, fell in love with ‘a fictional realm that I’d…

Unusually for a book about nature, the species in question, in this lucid story of the relationship between birds and…

In the summer of 1940, after almost 20 years in Paris, Man Ray fled the Nazis for the country of…

‘Whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right…’ The much quoted words of Rodion Raskolnikov, the…

James Courage is one of those fine writers who, though he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, has now more…

‘I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself,’ Mel Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1977, in…

In January 1780 the news reached London that Captain Cook had been killed and eaten in Hawaii. The story of…

‘Read slowly, word by word, if you wish to understand what I am saying.’ Despite appearing in Essays Two, the…

Atrocities, assassinations and spectacular accidents were just some of the horrors that marked 1922, says Richard Davenport-Hines

There are a thousand overtly artistic things to talk about at this summer moment including the new Sidney Nolan exhibition…

It’s 2022 and classical music is, again, dead. It’d be surprising if it wasn’t. In 2014 the New Yorker published…

It’s a sweet, green, glowing dawn in north-west Scotland. All around us are empty hillsides of rock and heather. The…

Boiling Point is a single-take drama set during a busy service at a London restaurant and it has to be…

One of my first jobs in journalism was as the arts correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. I’d hop on my…

Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust has been adapted at the Bridge. The yarn is set in Oxford, and the…

‘This is not a book,’ is the first line of Paul Gauguin’s final memoir, Avant et Après, written on Hiva…

The importance of understudies has been elevated to new heights by the pandemic, says Sarah Crompton

Of the making of many books, the Bible says, ‘there is no end’. It’s starting to feel a bit like…

‘Lashings of ginger beer?’ asked my husband when I mentioned backlash. He thought the phrase came from Enid Blyton, though…

The explosion in remote and flexible working accelerated by the pandemic slightly supports my assertion that the most important limits…

Q. I live alone, happily and remotely, but many miles from my immediate family. My son’s wife has very kindly…

I learnt a horrible new word during the holidays: Twixmas. It refers to the 27-30 December period and has its…

Each unclued lights include one letter three times. The wording of the preamble precludes ALLYLS (2D which would be the…

A 21-word exchange appears (apart from two words) in nine unclued entries. The other unclued entry specifies one of the…

In Competition No. 3230, you were invited to supply a double acrostic poem, the first and last letters of each…

White to play. Abdusattorov–Rakhmatullaev, Uzbek Championship 2021. How did White deliver a pretty mate in two moves? Answers should be…

There was only one flaw in my Christmas this year. I did not spend enough of it with Santa Claus-age…

Chess offers one ultimate consolation in defeat: the opportunity to set the pieces up and start again. At least in…

We’re all guilty of making silly mistakes at the bridge table and then hurriedly trying to explain them away —…

Seen any groundhogs your way? In racing the New Year began much as the old one had ended. At Cheltenham’s…

Last night I dreamt I went on holiday again. It seemed to me I stood by the departure gate, and…

I listed for Catriona the reasons why I did not want to go out to dinner that evening at the…

Gstaad   It is hard to imagine that we have reached the year 2022 and are still imposing completely irrelevant…