Autocrat and autodidact
The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it…
Big cats and bad hairdos
The prestige podcasting era began in 2014, when the true-crime Serial gripped us with the ‘did-he-dunnit’ mystery of whether Adnan…
Sly and saucy
At last, and finally: literary sex is back. The Bad Sex Prize has a lot to answer for in British…
The great pretender
It’s 1993 and you’re studying at a top agricultural college with a bright future ahead of you, perhaps in farming…
Hopes and fears
When Violet wakes up in Birmingham Women’s Hospital at the start of Alex Hyde’s debut novel her first thought is…
Fraudulent tripe
It’s getting silly now. London’s subsidised theatres aren’t just competing to put on the worst play of the year but…
Senses sent awry
Jesus is a Malteser. You might say I’m a liar or accuse me of the most egregious heresy, but the…
High on the Hogg
The Souvenir: Part II is Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir (2019) but it’s not your regular sequel. It’s not…
Bridge
I’ve been friends with the England player Mike Bell for many years; as top bridge professionals go, I’d say he…
Architectural upskirting
Paintings of houses go back a long way in British art: the earliest landscape in Tate Britain is a late…
Real life
After an incredible 13 emails, Vodafone decided that I was who I was claiming to be, and refunded my money.…
Jethro Tull: The Zealot Gene
Grade: C+ I bought the ‘seminal’ Jethro Tull double album Thick as a Brickfrom a secondhand shop when I…
Nancy takes a knee for Beijing at the Winter Olympics
Nancy Pelosi, stock-trader extraordinaire, doubles as an adviser to America’s Olympic athletes. And her wise, nuanced advice to them is…
How do we fix ‘stupid’?
It took centuries of history – wars fought, won, and lost – to bring together the world’s greatest philosophers and…
Pelosi to Winter Olympians: shut up and dribble
Apologies to woke athletes — Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want you to “use your platform” in Beijing. On Thursday, the House…
The banality of Prince Harry
When Prince Harry was unveiled as ‘chief impact officer’ at a tech start-up in California, many people were baffled. What…
Who would join Boris’s No. 10?
Munira Mirza’s resignation over Boris Johnson’s refusal to withdraw his Savile barb at Keir Starmer led to Downing Street bringing…
Boris’s staffing dilemma
How much trouble is Boris Johnson now in? The Prime Minister suffered one of his most tumultuous days in office…
The great Tory Red Wall betrayal
Boris Johnson may well have to go. His own proximity to a party in his private flat in Downing Street…
When the fringe becomes the majority
I’ve noticed a pattern over the past few years. We saw it when Joker made over a billion dollars at…
Can Big Tech remain as the arbiter of politics?
Increasingly, climate change is coming to dominate energy supply and indeed the whole economy. Modest changes to the climate are…
‘Whoopsi’ Goldberg’s learning curve
‘I stand corrected,’ said Whoopi Goldberg, the day after she was advised that the Holocaust was indeed a racist slaughter.…
Midwifery language dehumanising women
A soon-to-be-released collaborative research paper led by a Sydney academic suggests that ‘de-sexing’ language around female reproduction could have ‘consequences…
$777.8 million wasted by NSW Health
The people of New South Wales will remember when Health Minister Brad Hazzard floated the idea of making the unvaccinated…
