Grand tours and package holidays
In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to…
Barometer
Tracing paper FBI agents raided Donald Trump’s estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, in search of papers he is accused of removing…
An exercise in futility
It’s possible that I owe Joe Biden some sort of an apology, however mealy-mouthed it might be. Last week I…
Food for thought
James Howells has spent years trying to persuade Newport council to allow him to spend millions digging up a rubbish…
Another pink gin please
At the height of the IRA’s terrorist campaign on mainland Britain in December 1974, a bomb was lobbed through the…
The (occasional) joy of being a QPR fan
I made my way to Loftus Road on Saturday for QPR’s first home fixture of the season. We’ve got a…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. My 74-year-old husband was having drinks in the garden of some young clients when he bit down on an…
Children have a lot to learn
Could our long journey to adulthood actually be the key to our success, wonders Sam Leith
Men under fire
On its posthumous publication in 1980, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate was widely compared with War and Peace. For all…
The essence of bohemian Paris
This book is about two people who reinvented themselves in 1920s Paris. Mark Braude focuses on Kiki de Montparnasse and…
How to build a monastery
I used to envy Catholic novelists – Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, François Mauriac – as having that extra point of…
Down to the sea again
In the garden of my house in Cornwall there is a smooth granite stone about the size and shape of…
Revolt in paradise
Since announcing his retirement in 2013, Jim Crace has had more comebacks than Kanye West, something for which we should…
Between history and fable
Once, when we shared the same history teacher in our teens, my older brother Dominic handed in an essay about…
Brave men in small boats
‘I found this story by accident,’ begins Julia Jones’s Uncommon Courage, referring to documents belonging to her late father that…
Hiding in plain sight
Not all Germans were swayed by Hitler, but the majority were. Karl Braun, the fugitive Nazi doctor at the heart…
Thinker and gadfly
Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian graphomaniac who infuriates some of the world’s most annoying people, and might for this reason…
Eat beef, save the planet
Yet again, farmers are under attack. This time, it is the beef industry because, apparently, cattle burp and fart out…
A voice of virtue?
I’m just going to come out and say what we’re all thinking – the Voice to Parliament is state-sanctioned racism.…
The shameful attack on Salman Rushdie
We are all praying that Salman Rushdie will be okay. What happened in Chautauqua in New York today is indescribably…
Kim Jong-un declares victory over Covid
Kim Jong-un’s notorious sister is back in the limelight. Not only is Kim Yo Jong reiterating her hostile words against…
Why does no one like Rishi?
Poor Rishi Sunak. Membership polls put him 30 point behind Liz Truss but there’s still three-and-a-half weeks to go in…
