Only a few months ago it was the Canadian government that attacked its own citizens in the most grotesque and…

Confirmation that we had finally left Australia’s increasingly stultifying wokeness behind came when our Qantas jet touched down in Singapore.…

How Boris makes even Morrison look like a conservative

Pocock in quacking form but things not so ducky for the Teals

EV pipedreams all out of juice

Why Ergas is wrong, wrong and wrong again

Why are feminists destroying feminism?

Justin Trudeau

Progressives rage about the right to abort while birth rates tumble

Green energy cools down

How virtue-signalling has replaced good government

Why Rishi Sunak quit

Who are the Tories lining up to replace Boris?

When did mistresses forget the art of secrecy?

Even wealthy émigrés are prepared to fight for Russia

Pause in a park or field in summer and look out across the grass and you’ll see a multitude of…

Runaway inflation is proving costly for Turkey’s oil wrestlers

Philosopher Nick Bostrom on the AI threat

The blight of the 20mph speed limit

What is the purpose of a Conservative government? It’s a reasonable question for voters to ask. In 2019 Boris Johnson…

Home Rishi Sunak resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Sajid Javid as Health Secretary. (Nadhim Zahawi accepted the post…

Sturgeon’s single issue Sir: Nicola Sturgeon needs to be careful what she wishes for. Declaring that the next general election…

Blooming huge Botanists discovered the largest species of giant water lily at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, with leaves more…

It feels like the end, but we’ve been here before. The past months of Boris Johnson’s teetering administration have felt…

Is anything anywhere getting noticeably better – economically speaking – or at least less bad? Are commodities and manufactured goods…

As of 2023, the novel for which I may still be best known will have been out for 20 years.…

The radical feminist publishing house Verso has begun, in its tweets, to refer to a section of the population as…

Few leaders could be as different in character as Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson, but one can compare their predicaments…

Male Tory MPs molesting young men? Buttock-squeezing and groin-fumbling at a private members’ club? A middle-aged politician slipping into a…

One problem of being mugged, I am told, is not just the event itself but the dreams of violence that…

Westminster has always been run more by convention than by rulebook. Prime ministers are seldom forced out: they are persuaded…

‘Jerusalem’ may be our unofficial national anthem, but don’t ask anyone who sings it to tell you what it means, says Philip Hensher

Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…

‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go…

Anthony Sattin begins with a quotation from Bruce Chatwin, who famously tried all his life to produce a book about…

Louise Perry is on a mission: ‘It wasn’t enough just to point out the problems with our new sexual culture,’…

A popular pastime in Britain is to post one’s breakfast on social media for strangers to pass judgment on bacon…

To study international politics since the turn of the century has been, in large part, to study the changing nature…

Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…

The news that Germaine Greer had put herself into a retirement home in sight of the Queensland forest she had…

On Tuesday night I was at the world première of a motet by Sir James MacMillan and I don’t think…

Cornelia Parker wasn’t born with a silver spoon in her mouth, but when she was growing up her German godparents…

Daisy Dunn on the art of surgery

A few years ago, I spoke to Mick Jagger and asked him which of the (relatively) new crop of rock…

Brian and Charles is a sweetly funny mockumentary about a lonely Welsh inventor who is not that good at inventing.…

Roy Williams’s new play is a wonky beast. It has two dense and cumbersome storylines that aren’t properly developed. Dawn…

‘The Terminal List is… a dated and drably made eight-part military thriller that offers little intrigue or excitement,’ says the…

Coined, as it was, by a dead white man whose oeuvre is considered one of the crowning achievements of Western…

No language column can ignore Professor Brendan Murphy’s extraordinary 78-word definition of ‘woman’. As you know, when he was questioned…

White to play. J. Polgar-Carlsen, Casual blitz game, Madrid 2022. Carlsen’s last move 15…Ra8-c8 was a losing blunder. How did…

I grew up by the seaside. More precisely, I grew up near South Shields, on the north-east coast – somewhere…

The perimetric names are NIJINSKY, NEVER SAY DIE, CREPELLO, THE MINSTREL, ROBERTO and TEENOSO, six of the nine Derby winners…

In Competition No. 3256, you were invited to take a well-known poem and recast it as a short story. Ben…

11 Across (two words) suggests the other unclued lights, which are all one-word anagrams of words of a kind (one…

Ian Nepomniachtchi is back for more. The former world championship challenger left his rivals in the dust at the Candidates…

Heading for a holiday in Sardinia, I remembered that the last time we were there our engine-less, drifting boat was…

All afternoon I had been horizontal next to an electric fan, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake and sometimes halfway between those…

The British Gas engineers arrived in convoy, and the dust from their tyres flew into the air as they came…

Q. This year once again my company took a small group of clients to lunch at Royal Ascot. Our guests…

Looking back and trying to choose just one out of those incomparably bewitching women of one’s youth can be tricky.…

It’s started again. Sixteen years ago, another ‘Toby Young’ kept appearing in my email inbox. I’d created a Google Alert…

In the 1980s, the great advertising writer John Webster described the following paradox. As he saw it, the dream of…

‘Club’ is a four-letter word. Whenever a club is mentioned in the press, it will inevitably be portrayed as a…

Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking,…

In one respect, it would be so much easier to play a game like poker or chess than bridge; if…