Solution to 2598: By any other name
The unclued lights are the former and current names of various products: 2/8A, 12/36, 16/32, 17/34, 13/22. First prize David…
2601: Men of note
The unclued lights are of a kind. Two solutions are initials. Across 1 Officers’ training school – place to write…
Drama in Astana
As I write, six of 14 games of the world championship match between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren have been…
Barometer
Putting out fires The Brecon Beacons National Park Authority said it was renaming the park because the word ‘beacon’ implies…
Ireland’s violent men of peace
It was from the Northern Ireland conflict that I first learned how language – like everything else – can be…
Scotch and rum
For people who take politics seriously and very earnestly, such as myself, the present debacle within the Scottish National party…
How to offend your customers
In some quarters, American enterprise is alive and well. Established in 1929 to promote consumer protection, the conservative non-profit Consumers’…
Cross purposes
On Easter Saturday, I wrote for the Times about the victimhood of Christ, describing this as a regrettable foundation for…
Virtue without virtuosity
If you live in London, you may well have spotted Shen Yun’s enormous candy-coloured posters on the Underground, endorsed by…
Sex offenders
It is, of course, traditional for film and TV reviewers to demonstrate their steely high-mindedness by claiming that anything describing…
The hair and now
‘A queer fellow’ is how John Everett Millais described Dante Gabriel Rossetti after his death, ‘so dogmatic and so irritable…
The sting in the tale
The Secret Life of Bees is a fairy-tale set in the Deep South in 1964. Lily, a bullied white girl,…
Heaven sent
Haydn’s The Creation is Paradise Lost without the Lost. True, the words aren’t exactly up there: translated into German by…
Songs for a life
Elton John has now been retiring for nearly five years. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour began in Allentown, Pennsylvania,…
Second worst person in the world
Sick of Myself is a satire from Norway that skewers the ‘look at me, look at me’ generation addicted to…
Checks and balances
Angus Colwell is not convinced that the V&A Dundee’s exhibition Tartan is what the city needs
