It’s not often these days that somebody who is a conservative, a Christian and a contributor to this magazine ends…

Merkel’s woeful legacy How ironic but unsurprising that Angela Merkel, for sixteen years leader of her country’s once-conservative Christian Democrats,…

And Australia is inside the firing line

Liberal and National leaders have betrayed everyday Australians

Covid has turned our civilised principles upside down

Greta’s quest for world socialism

Australia will be hoodwinked at COP 26

Our Covid despotism can all be sheeted back to the PM’s cowardice

We are being denied critical information

Premier, why didn’t you listen? After ICAC’s attempt to destroy that model of integrity, Crown Prosecutor, Margaret Cuneen was scuttled…

We keep hearing about the importance of levelling up. Architects tasked with the responsibility of building new homes, however, might…

Cressida Dick must go

Sajid Javid has big plans for the NHS – if Covid lets him

Why I retrained as a butcher

Why isn’t John von Neumann better known?

For China, the climate is a useful bargaining chip

The world is fighting for gas – and China is determined to win

Get ready for factory closures and cold homes

A world without criticism is just advertising

It’s a strange reflection of our times that with so much else at stake, the leaders of both main parties…

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he did not think Britain was in a crisis; he wanted it to…

How to stay safe Sir: Mary Wakefield is correct to highlight the opprobrium heaped on anyone who suggests sensible safety…

So James Bond is back, doing exactly what he always does, inviting the audience into a fantasy world for the…

Whole-life sentences How many prisoners are serving whole-life sentences? — There are currently 74 prisoners in prison with whole-life tariffs;…

The rhythm of the big party conference leader interviews is a strange one. First come days of slow, repetitive, detailed…

We can suffer a lethal pandemic with lockdowns, petrol shortages and supermarket shelves almost entirely denuded of sausages. But when…

Trends in New York City tend to foretell trends in London, whose fashions in turn set the pace for smaller…

‘Blame it all on business’ was the Tory strategists’ answer to petrol queues and the risk of a no-turkey Christmas…

Most prime ministers would be worried about supply chain shortages. But as became increasingly clear at the Tory party conference…

Two important studies have been published this autumn on the apparent failure of our almost 20-year war in Afghanistan. In…

How might the centre-right do better? This is the question that the promising young writer Jake Thrupp has posed; and…

It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…

As the start date of COP26 draws closer, and just when we are assailed by daily proof of climate chaos,…

UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In…

This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…

Fast boats and fast women have been the ruin of many a poor boy. But they can also prove a…

Honor Clerk explores the history of the world through colour, from the Stone Age to orbiting the Moon

We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…

The true English disease is Downton Syndrome. Symptoms include a yearning for a past of chivalry, grandeur and unambiguously stratified…

A time of plague makes us brood on the culture we share in the absence of personal preference. One person…

Ian Pace on musicology’s culture wars

‘It’s generally agreed that in contemporary practice, this opera proposes significant ethical and cultural problems,’ says the director Lindy Hume…

Murder Island features eight real-life ‘ordinary people’ seeking to solve a fictional killing on a fictional Scottish island. What follows…

This week, an excellent film (Moving On) and a film that isn’t at all, but is entirely worth it as…

The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like…

Since art auctions were invented, they have served to hype artists’ prices. It can happen during an artist’s lifetime —…

The Normal Heart is not about Aids. Larry Kramer’s play is set in New York in 1981 at a time…

One of the most compelling things about Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, is the way we don’t…

A new study by researchers at the University of Western Australia shows that the most trusted accent in Australia is…

Caroline and I are just back from a weekend break in Scotland and, nice though it was, I hadn’t realised…

‘Here you are, darling,’ I said to my husband. ‘These lines might have been written for you: “Drinke, quaffe, be…

Around 20 or so years ago I had a point for match point on a perfect grass court at Fort…

The chesty Corsican taxi driver was giving me his earnest appraisal of the way things were headed in France politically.…

It is interesting to consider what would have happened if the Covid virus had emerged in 1921. Or 1821. Or…

White to play. Mamedyarov–Artemiev, MeltwaterChampions Final 2021. Black’s last move, was Ra8-a4, attacking the pawn on g4. But it allowed…

One of my favourite Bridge proverbs is ‘Play the card you’re known to hold’. It doesn’t mean we should blithely…

Three unclued lights together form an eight-word question from a well-known song. The song’s protagonist suggests the other five unclued…

The quotation is ‘I DO WISH THOU WERT A [dog] THAT I MIGHT LOVE THEE SOMETHING’. The honest servant is…

In Competition No. 3219, you were invited to supply clerihews on well-known scientists, past and present. The subject of the…

Since tennis matches are decided in sets, they are sometimes won by the player who has won fewer games. For…

Q. An acquaintance suggested organising a celebratory dinner in honour of some mutual friends. He asked my husband and me,…

The filling station on the road out of the village was like a scene from Mad Max. People were all…

We were in deepest Dorset, l’Angleterre profonde. The weather was also typically English: inundations followed by counter-attacks from the Indian…