Was it satire? Writing in the Australian newspaper this week, long-term political commentator Paul Kelly has decreed from on high…

I don’t normally do obituaries except, as the politicians and lawyers say,  ‘in exceptional circumstances’. And there could be no…

The tricky terrain of taxing trusts

Labor’s shameful judge

Pinnochio would be impressed

On processes over passion

Would England do better without Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?

Why should taxpayers fund this obscenity?

Facts should trump fiction

One Nation’s newest MP is a man for all parties

Budget hides $4 trillion of debt as billions shovelled to Beijing

‘You are going to die before me and leave me to deal with this, and I will curse your soul…

How do you fight an election if you’re under house arrest? If you’re the Russian-Armenian businessman Samvel Karapetyan, once the…

‘Tequila, it makes me happy,/ Con Tequila it feels fine’ goes the student anthem by Terrorvision. It is midnight, somewhere…

These are good times to be a scholar of the classical world. Last summer, Donald Trump issued an order that…

It’s hot in Havana. The summer’s electrical storms have arrived, lighting up the sky, while down on the ground we’ve…

You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What…

On 19 November 1941, King George and Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Woburn Abbey, home of Britain’s covert propaganda…

Home Vickrum Digwa, 23, was jailed for life with a minimum term of 21 years for the murder of Henry…

I have been opening a play. It is called Allegra and is about a woman who is relentlessly happy. This…

Keeping their promises Sir: Matt Ridley is right to assert the conservation role of gamekeepers (‘Ruffled feathers’, 30 May). They,…

An artist, J.R., working with something called Snap Inc., has covered the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris with a gigantic tarpaulin…

Darren Jones has become the government’s Walter Model, the general known during the second world war as ‘the Führer’s fireman’…

I had a notion the other day that there was possibly more I could offer to this fleeting world. A…

Even the most gormless of Labour politicians don’t try to persuade the electorate that taxation is a privilege – a…

I wonder how many readers have ever heard of the name Kriss Donald? The young Glaswegian was just 15 years…

Best not to say too much about Albert Manifold, who was ousted as chairman of BP last week after only…

Two lonely residents of east London, well-matched in their attachment to idle dreams, make an awkward stab at a relationship

The actor Alain Delon emerges as an habitué of France’s brutal underworld in a comprehensive investigation of the 1968 Markovic Affair

‘Maps are acts of colonisation, enemy tools,’ says Tomás, a reluctant cartographer in 19th-century Ireland, where cruel English landowners lord it over soulful, downtrodden locals

When the cuckoo is no longer heard and even the last badger shuffles off, the inhabitants of Lower Eodham, a village mentioned in Domesday, sense that change can no longer be resisted

The fairy tale stems from our hopeful desires, says the folklorist Jack Zipes – who sees the Land of Oz as a utopian antidote to emerging American capitalism

Rapid technological change, real estate bubbles and a heavy reliance on debt helped precipitate the first Great Depression, with striking parallels to the situation today

In an attempt to relieve the drudgery of warehouse work, technology has now eliminated all need for human decision-making, Sarah O’Connor discovers

We overrate our capacity for rational deliberation, says Turi Munthe, when weather, soil, climate and geography are what really determine of our opinions and beliefs

As Russia and Turkey jostle for influence in Europe’s overlooked corners, regional tensions begin to resemble those in the build-up to the Great War

The singer himself described his career as ‘unreal’, and admitted that one reason for cruising was the rare chance it gave him to meet ‘ordinary people’

A group of writers in north London find themselves under siege in the local café as race riots erupt in a divided neighbourhood

Even with minor initiatives such a reforestation and accessing lost water resources we can help Nature rebalance and avoid environmental catastrophe, says Thomas Crowther

An abusive childhood may help explain the contradictory character of Britain’s great second world war commander, says Gary Mead

When Ken Branagh took the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford for the first time in thirty years…

Madfabulous is a biopic of Henry Paget, the fifth Marquess of Anglesey, who was probably mad and definitely fabulous. His…

On 30 May 1966, the Beatles released ‘Paperback Writer’ – a fortnight after ‘Paint It Black’ by the Rolling Stones…

You know you’re getting old when you see Geena Davis from Thelma & Louise cast as a granny sex symbol…

End of the Rainbow feels like a prison drama set in London in 1969. Judy Garland is about to give…

Nature smiled on the opening week of Opera Holland Park’s new season. There’s no better advertisement for semi-outdoor opera than…

A retired priest in North Wales told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to…

In pre-internet 1980s Australia, maintaining long-distance relationships in real time was so expensive that for expats like me the decade’s…

A report in Perspectives on Psychological Science last April said that people are each speaking about 120,000 fewer words every…

Competition 3452 invited you to write an ode to the World Cup. The entries flew in and many of them…

‘There’s a flat rat under the mat!’ I shrieked, and wondered whether that was the sort of jaunty phrase that…

I would have enjoyed mathematics more at school if I’d known what the real value was. The benefit of studying…

The heatwave no sooner ended than it was replaced by the Mandywave. Over the next few days, it may be…

What will you do if it all goes wrong? I have a back-up plan. Working for Amazon. Its Luton warehouse…

‘That’s not a facepalm,’ said my husband. ‘It’s a headslap.’ He proved the point by making contact between the flat…

Q. I have been working in a large restaurant alongside a very attractive, although shy, girl. I live near the…

The big revelation in Lord Ashcroft’s forthcoming biography of Nigel Farage is that he’s been banned from Desert Island Discs.…