The causes of gout
Medical problems come and go in the media, and at the moment the flavour of the month appears to be…
The return to Flushing Meadow
British tennis fans famously only acknowledge the sport exists for a couple of weeks in the middle of summer in…
Barometer
Finnish lines Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said she had taken a test for illegal drugs after being filmed at…
Rough justice
At 4.38 a.m., one morning in October 2013, the radio presenter Paul Gambaccini was understandably asleep when the doorbell rang.…
Letters
Overhaul the GMC Sir: Max Pemberton’s cogent criticism of the GMC (‘Unfit for purpose’, 20 August). is one of the…
Woodstock this wasn’t
One learns the strangest things at festivals. That, for instance, this summer has been a bit of a blackcurrant disaster…
Portrait of the week
Home Inflation would reach 18.6 per cent by January and the energy price cap £5,816 in April, according to a…
Less than meets the eye
Beast is, the blurb tells us, a ‘pulse-pounding thriller about a father and his daughters who find themselves hunted by…
Butter
Butter was not a major part of my childhood. In fact, I don’t remember it ever being in our fridge.…
Emancipation man
Winslow Homer may be too all-American for British tastes but a forthcoming retrospective could change all that, says Laura Gascoigne
I’d be the perfect communist shill
Could I be the model communist shill? Consider these facts: I was born and raised in China. I speak and…
Salman Rushdie and a question of power
Whenever a terrorist attack occurs, like the recent attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, our society falls into the usual platitudes.…
Solution to 2567: Stop!
The unclued lights (including the pairs at 2/14 and 12/36) are names of organ stops which Brewer calls ‘music in…
How to run a school
Taking a short break from persecuting Roman Catholic faith schools for ideological reasons, Ofsted has stuck the boot into the…
Cosy crime
In Competition No. 3263, you were invited to submit a short story, written in the style of a cosy mystery…
Who will Liz forgive?
Liz Truss has always been more popular with Tory party members than with Tory politicians. The moment of greatest peril…
A week in Torquay
Hats off to Harry Grieve, who took clear first place at the Chessable British Championships which concluded in Torquay last…
A mini art form
It sounds disingenuous, not to say dis-respectful, but as a writer of 40 books, give or take, I never read…
Under a bad moon
Million-selling rock bands are rarely happy families. They are an uneasy combination of a creative alliance and a business partnership,…
Foul play in Ferrara
There’s a moment near the end of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’ when it becomes clear that the…
Letter from Bangkok
I moved to Bangkok ten years ago in order to be in a place where nothing happens, where no one…
