Low life
Our neighbour Michael is a keen and knowledgable attender of vides-greniers, the equivalent of our car-boot sales. His focus is…
Bridge
Did you know that a ‘heartbreaker’ is a real term in bridge? It’s described in The Bridge Player’s Encyclopedia as…
Lines on lines
In Competition No. 3270, you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The Queue’. As well as inspiring this…
Reworking Dickens
Putting new wine into old wineskins is an increasingly popular fictional mode. Retellings of 19th-century novels abound. Jane Austen inevitably…
Temples of delight
There are two journeys I’ll need to make after reading Tessa Boase’s heartbreakingly poignant book about London’s lost department stores.…
2577: Light and dark
The unclued lights (three of two words, one of which has an apostrophe) are of two kinds. Across 6 Eat…
The new rules of sex
There are times when I feel like certain rakes must have done when they realised that the Regency period was suddenly…
Secret assignations
Adam Sisman on the private life of John le Carré, revealed in letters and a kiss-and-tell
Earth is not a Greenhouse
Warming alarmists claim: ‘Earth’s atmosphere acts like the glass in a greenhouse.’ This is false. Glass is largely transparent to…
Is there anything left of Trussonomics?
After two major U-turns over last month’s mini-Budget and the sacking of a chancellor, what’s left of Liz Truss’s economic…
Five ways the Liz Truss saga could end
How does this end? That’s the question being asked by Tory MPs as Liz Truss’s government finds itself in turmoil…
Russian cannon fodder
Never before has the world been so gripped with saving lives. We’ve survived Covid lockdowns imposed by governments claiming they’d…
How to stop Just Stop Oil
The National Gallery is home to Van Gogh’s still life Sunflowers. It’s an oil on canvas that, according to the…
It’s time for the US to revoke China’s ‘normal trade’ status
In April 2022, six weeks after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, President Biden signed legislation to suspend Russia’s Permanent Normal Trade…
‘She’s just so bad at everything’: Tory MPs turn on Truss
Liz Truss’s Downing Street press conference has made everything worse, as far as Tory MPs are concerned. As soon as…
The spectacular fall of Liz Truss
Is Liz Truss the new Theresa May? A fortnight ago that question seemed unduly insulting to the Prime Minister. Now it…
Liz Truss’s painful press conference fails to calm Tory nerves
Liz Truss has just confirmed that she is U-turning on another part of her government’s not-so-mini Budget. After sacking her…
Ukraine braces itself for Russia’s cold war
So far this week, 128 Russian missiles have been fired at Ukraine. Half were intercepted by air defences, according to…
Why Truss picked Hunt for Chancellor
A day is a long time in politics. Just this morning, a No. 10 source told the BBC the Prime…
Will sacking Kwarteng be enough to save Truss’s premiership?
Can sacking Kwasi Kwarteng really save Liz Truss’s premiership? In the past few minutes, the chancellor has had a meeting…
Removing PMs hardly ever ends well
As Tory MPs appear to descend into a panic of buyers’ remorse over the election of Liz Truss, they would…
The sectarian shame of Ireland’s women’s football team
How bad is Irish nationalism’s sectarian problem? In the somewhat Panglossian world occupied by nationalist and republican activists and politicians…
Why won’t Graham Norton speak up for JK Rowling?
Is silence still violence? I’m just wondering because this week Graham Norton was asked about the deluge of hateful slurs…
