What do sugar and cocaine have in common?
Stephen Fry is a national treasure whom half the nation can’t stand. He drops his façade of loveability mid-chortle as…
Why I’m optimistic about multiculturalism
Many of my conservative friends are beginning to catastrophise about the future of Britain in light of the pro-Palestinian protests…
Are smartphones making us care less about humanity?
Generation Z were the first to grow up attached to smartphones. They spent their adolescence bathed in screen-light and now…
Be prepared to wait: how to make French onion soup like the French
Let me be clear: this week’s recipe is not a speedy little number. You can’t knock up a French onion…
How to speak London
Cockney is dead, but so is the King’s English. Long live Standard Southern British English. The Cockney Barbara Windsor yelling…
Any protest which threatens the Cenotaph is a travesty
Every year I lay a wreath a week early, because Blyth, my nearest town, was a submarine port. Submariners were…
Letters: Israel/Gaza isn’t the time for fence-sitting
Ill-judged Sir: Professor Carl Henegan’s authoritative demolition of the Covid Inquiry (‘The Covid whitewash’, 4 November) prompts the question of…
The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank
This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40…
Are you a creative or a destructive?
There is a stage direction in The Glass Menagerie in which Tennessee Williams describes a tune that will recur through…
The best of this year’s children’s books
Among many delights, the Greco-Persian wars are brought to thrilling new life and a truly bizarre Alaskan folk tale is retold
Why do the British still dream of bricks and mortar?
For the past century, a ‘property-owning democracy’ has been envisaged as a kind of magic cure for social ills. But high prices now mean the opposite of emancipation for many
Magnificent men in their automobiles: the 1907 Peking-Paris rally
Kassia St Clair tells the gripping story of how competitors drove 15,000 km across mountains, desert and flooded rivers to prove the practicality of the early motor car
Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed
Posing as social services employees, two female ex-cons talk their way into the homes of elderly widows in order to drug them and steal their valuables
From the Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz: Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, reviewed
Everything blends into everything else as an Aboriginal knight errant sets out on a quest to save his scorched native bushlands
The horror of finding oneself ‘young-old’
‘I used to run upstairs all the time,’ sixtysomething Marcus Berkmann recalls wistfully, as, midway through life’s journey, he wakes to find himself in a dark wood
A bird’s-eye view: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, reviewed
Six astronauts at the International Space Station observe the ravages on Mother Earth, but remain hopeful that mankind will find another parent planet
No laughing matter: accusations of transphobia wrecked Graham Linehan’s life
The comedian found himself out of work and out of his marriage when he challenged the transgender ideology that to be a man or women is about choosing an identity
The beauty of medieval bestiaries
Spiders, owls, elephants and dragons appear alongside dog-headed men and tusked women in a wealth of texts explaining the world in the most vivid terms then available
