Language
I have written here in the past about the expression ‘weaponised words.’ There are many examples: ‘fascist’, ‘Nazi’ and ‘hard-right’…
Reshuffle season
Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak have something in common: both men are under pressure to reshuffle their front benches and…
Bad education
Rishi Sunak tends to shy away from social issues so it has been left to a backbencher, Miriam Cates, to…
The myth of intersectional politics
A few years ago I mentioned the profusion of moaning women on BBC Radio 4, after a longish car journey…
Super Tuscans
In Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the hopes embodied in the title dissolve into grimness and black irony. It was all…
Bureaucrats have seized control
I have a hunch why people in late middle age are abandoning the workforce: their jobs, as they once knew…
Solution to 2608: Support
Reading the title as ‘backup’, unclued answers VOLTE-FACE, RETREAT, SPIN, TURN, COUNTER, BACKTRACK, WITHDRAWAL, ROTATE, RETIREMENT and RECOIL had to…
My new law is better than Ireland’s
I’ve always been envious of journalists who give their names to ‘laws’, as in O’Sullivan’s First Law: ‘All organisations that…
Sonnets on sonnets
In Competition No. 3305, you were invited to submit a sonnet entitled ‘Sonnet On Famous And Familiar Sonnets’. The germ…
Puzzle No. 758
White to play and win. Composed by Josef Hasek, 1929. One plausible try is 1 Kc5 but 1…f5! prepares to…
The hell of speed chess
Somewhere in hell, there is a cavernous hall filled with row upon row of people playing online speed chess. Their…
The unspeakable truth about housing
Earlier this year I was a panellist for Any Questions, and a young man in the audience asked what could…
