Barometer
Wagtime Footballers’ wives Rebekah Vardy and Coleen Rooney are locked in a libel trial dubbed ‘Wagatha Christie’. The term WAGs,…
The only way is up for England’s cricketers
The timing of Brendon McCullum’s appointment as England’s Test match coach couldn’t be better for him, or for the matey…
2556: Recent origins
The unclued entries have something in common, and are the most recent of their type. One umlaut should be ignored…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. I’m 28 and lucky enough to own a four-bed house in Notting Hill. I let three of the rooms…
Et in Arcade ego
I should know better than to visit restaurants assembled as if from disparate bricks, like thrift-shop Duplo: but the ever-credulous…
Roman myths
Ravenna, Italy The war in Ukraine has caused an unholy convergence of the left and right in Italy.…
Solution to 2553: Island alien
The unclued lights when arranged as 12, 11, 43, 5, 24, 1D, 1A form Chambers’definition of MULLET at 30D. First…
Sparks
‘It’s not as nice as it looks,’ said my husband, not leaving time to look it in the mouth before…
Puzzle No. 703
White to play. Vachier-Lagrave-Caruana, Bucharest 2022. The Bh4 can retreat to g3, f2 or e1. Which one is best, and…
A fine romance
In Competition No. 3249, you were invited to submit an extract from a Mills & Boon novel whose central character…
The Spectator’s Notes
Justified relief that soldiers are now coming out of the Azovstal steelworks alive is accompanied by anxiety about what might…
Rock, paper, scissors
The Superbet Chess Classic in Bucharest concluded last weekend in a dramatic tiebreak between Wesley So, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Levon…
Diary
It is a glorious spring evening in Lviv and what could be better than a ballet gala at one of…
Boris’s fighting talk
Boris Johnson has never quite been able to decide whether he wants to be a great unifier or a great…
The dishonesty of our age
It isn’t hard to notice that some crimes are more important than others. Or at least more politically advantageous. It…
Ship shape
The biggest cruise ship yet builthas just been launched, but in like-for-like terms, it comes nowhere near the Syracusia,built c.…
No time-wasters, please
Apparently Anna Wintour wants to be seen as human, and Amy Odell’s biography goes some way to helping her achieve…
When she was good…
In June 1957, Robert Lowell attended a poetry reading by E.E. Cummings. Sitting dutifully and deferentially alongside him were Allen…
Forewarned is not forearmed
When Ray Bradbury was asked if his dystopian vision in Fahrenheit 451 would become a reality, he replied: ‘I don’t…
A mad racket
There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…
Travels in time and space
It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St.…
Truth in small matters
‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that…
