The making of a poet
Charles Causley was a poet’s poet. Both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin considered him the finest candidate for the laureateship,…
Women’s work
The inhabitants of Tuscany and Umbria can claim to be the most civilised beings on the planet, even exceeding the…
A troubled past
Andrew Miller specialises in characters who are lost, often struggling to deal with the burden of failure. They don’t come…
The return of Actual Badness
In the spring of 2020, I advanced an abnormally hopeful proposition: that one blessing that might arise from a pandemic…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. Recently I started hanging out with a new friend. We are both in our twenties, single, and usually go…
Too hot to handle
This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…
Wicked smaht
When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League…
Mushrooms and missiles
Vladimir Putin’s decision on Sunday to put his ‘deterrence forces’ – code for nuclear weapons – in a high state…
Solution to 2542: Wider II
The unclued lights and COMPOSERS (35A) are RIBBONS/Gibbons (1A), MAILER/Mahler (7), RAMEAN/Rameau (25), WANTON/Walton (26A), DELICES/Delibes (46), RAVENER/Tavener (1D), BELLING/Bellini…
2545: With a twist
41 (four words) suggests the other unclued lights – which are individual examples (not group names) of a kind –…
Tyrants past and present
Is Putin a tyrant? Aristotle (384-322 bc) might well have thought so. Seeing the turannos as a deviant type of…
Puzzle no. 692
White to play and win. A gem discovered by the Ukrainian composer Vladislav Tarasiuk with Israeli composer Amatzia Avni. How…
Barometer
The wild one Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said that Vladimir Putin had gone ‘full tonto’. The word tonto is used…
The turf
Even when the authorities were refusing Milton Harris the right to renew his training licence after he got his finances…
Diary
Lviv, Ukraine On the Ukrainian side of the Polish border, near a place called Shehyni where the refugee crisis…
High life
St Moritz Once upon a time, not that long ago, St Moritz was the world’s greatest resort, an exclusive winter…
Friends in need
During the Cold War, any citizen of a Soviet bloc country who made it to Britain and claimed asylum was…
Back with a vengeance
If you were a teenager before 2005, one reminder of tuberculosis in British life is that small circular scar on…
