Following her husband attending last weekend’s anti-lockdown protest, and then having been spotted and recognised on TV, a young Sydney…

Sadly, it looks as if the allegation that Australian troops committed war crimes in Afghanistan is true. In fact, here…

Hobart’s historical heretics violated ‘Vitalist, unscrupulously optimistic cultures, cruel, bigoted and superstitious, all detest the grace-saving presence of the statue…

A day at the anti-lockdown rally When your only observations of protest marches are from television news reports, it’s easy…

Conservatives have been betrayed by the hollow men and women

How ‘progressives’ don’t hesitate to bend the rules

The battle for early treatment being waged behind enemy lines

More bread and circuses as the Olympics head to Queensland

Current Covid-19 policy settings provide no exit

Now the Isle of Man is claiming the Bee Gees? How dare they!

At all levels we are seeing power without responsibility

In December 2019, and in keeping with our tradition of perverse birthday gifts, some friends gave me a bidet device.…

The WHO’s fervent campaign against e-cigarettes

Why have we become so quick to anger?

Sixty-eight years ago, when I was four, my Scottish father and English mother took me from London to South Africa,…

How Britain can stem the stream of illegal arrivals

The troubling truth about Britain’s nuclear deal with China

They’re bright, brave – and could help solve our labour crisis

Modern soap operas have lost the plot

A note about manure Sir: I am afraid Matt Ridley shows a lack of understanding about agriculture in general and…

The past week has seen another media splash about the self-exiled Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Following the recent ruckus…

Home The daily number of coronavirus cases detected by tests fell from 54,674 on 17 July to 23,511 by 27…

Winners at the Olympics were thought to have come as close to a god as any man could. But that…

There is something bizarre about a sporting event designed to bring people and nations together but from which spectators have…

Reinventing the wheels Skateboarding made its debut at the Olympics. Who invented the skateboard? — There are many reports of…

I’m off. In the week when you may read this, my partner and I will be winging our way to…

As I begin, I’m tortured by the doo-do-doo-do of The Twilight Zone’s theme music. I’ve hurtled back in time. Suddenly…

Be glad you’re not in Dr Mike Lynch’s shoes. A London judge has ruled that the founder of the Cambridge-based…

On Tuesday, I chaired a session at Policy Exchange addressed by Tony Abbott, the eloquent former prime minister of Australia,…

Last week there was acute concern in government about the country’s re-opening. Would restrictions need to be reimposed when schools…

I think I would like to apologise for this article in case someone who reads it takes offence. I will…

If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein observed, it’s a curious way to structure a novel. But…

The other day a friend asked me what a lascar was. Fair enough: it’s not a word you come across…

In my second year at secondary school we were all deeply envious of a girl named Judi Taylor because, obviously,…

Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974

During the first lockdown last year, taking my lockdown puppy for our Boris-sanctioned daily walks, I discovered a love of…

It is a truism that a book needs readers in order to have a meaningful existence. Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages…

Writers of memoirs are often praised for their honesty — but how do we know? I found I did believe…

Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus,…

In March 2014 Gabriel García Márquez went down with a cold. The man who wrote beautifully about ageing was approaching…

William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…

You need to be wary of being too flattering about English churches. As John Betjeman said: ‘Be careful before you…

Sir Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, writes that ‘the last year has been an eye-opener for me.…

What earthly guarantee do we have that live performance is going to be a viable option for Sydney or Melbourne…

It can be difficult to remember that Tennessee Williams, the great songster of the Deep South during the 1950s, was…

Stuart Jeffries takes the ferry to Orford Ness, a strange shingle spit on the Suffolk coast, where art mingles with death

The biggest challenge in reviewing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old lies in describing its central idea without making the film sound…

Last week I attended a dance performance in person for the first time since March last year. If you’d asked…

Alexander Litvinenko lies in a London hospital, dying of polonium poisoning. That photograph from 2006 haunts the memory: the medical…

Listening to Trees A Crowd, a podcast exploring the ‘56(ish) native trees of the British Isles’, solved one of childhood’s…

There was, you may remember, a time when Sunday night television was rather a jolly affair: gently plotted and full…

Heads turn, strangers gawp, matrons tut or look in envy. A man doffs his bowler hat knowing when he is…

For obvious reasons, lockdowns have been much easier to deal with for Australians who live alone. Not for them the…

Edward de Bono—the inventor of ‘lateral thinking’—died recently. I interviewed him a number of times on my radio show (he…

The unclued lights appeared at the start under the shaded squares reading row by row from top to bottom (two…

In the body of chess rules, castling is a clumsy protuberance. Once per game, you get to move king and…

White to play. Greco–NN, 1620. The centre is a dangerous place for the king. Which move does White play to…

In Competition No. 3209, you were invited to provide Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of a Tory MP. Inspiration for this challenge…

Unclued lights were stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes. (The Adventures of the: EMPTY (41) HOUSE (2), DANCING MEN…

Rather miraculously, my daughter managed to leave the country last week to go on holiday with a group of friends.…

Q. Passing Buckingham Palace in a taxi the other day, I saw the ceremonial wing of the Household Division prancing…

I was shown to a room divided into three cubicles, each with a reclining chair and bed table. In the…

The doctor’s receptionist was adamant. ‘If you had not had the vaccine you would have been even more ill with…

  Nairobi Since my father first caught sight of Mombasa from his ship in late 1929, at least some of my…

The title of the keenly awaited volume of memoirs by John Martin Robinson sounds like a crossword clue: Holland Blind…

In an apparently benign — almost prelapsarian — setting, the Rhine is an epitome of the human condition. Scenery is…

Why does virtue-signalling matter? It’s a fair question. After all, if people display virtuous behaviour, need we care about their…

When I started learning bridge (about 20 years ago) I was taught the basic guidelines of play and defence and…

  Isle of Patmos Two hundred years ago last March, the Greeks rose up against the hated Turks who had occupied…