Watching the detective
Producers are getting jittery again. Large-scale shows look risky when a single infection can postpone an entire show. Hence Poirot…
Untenable
‘Nurse! The tenaculum!’ exclaimed my husband in the manner of James Robertson Justice playing the surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt. I’m…
Home and away
After Artemis Fowl and Murder on the Orient Express you may have had concerns about Kenneth Branagh ever helming a…
Neville’s advocate
Nigel Jones talks to the writer Robert Harris about Blair, Johnson and Polanski, cancel culture and his quest to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain
A lot of bottle
Thirteen years ago we shared an office building with a large international bank. A common lift connected both businesses to…
Diary
After my Unapologetic Diaries were published recently, I was apparently accused of offending several people. At a lavish Christmas lunch…
A multitude of queens
Here’s a challenge which appeared in a German chess magazine in 1848: place eight white queens on an empty chessboard…
A dram for Tam
The bleak midwinter. Actually, since I wallowed in curmudgeonly complaints about dreich days, everything has improved. Clear blue skies, pleasing…
Have I got news for you
In Competition No. 3232, you were invited to retell a news story from the past year in sonnet form. An…
After Omicron
Covid-19 is in decline in Britain, with Omicron cases now falling as fast as they rose. The booster programme —…
Christmas crossword solution
The NATIVITY (89) of the ACTOR (37) HUMPHREY BOGART (47/13), the singers ANNIE LENNOX (112/12) and IAN BOSTRIDGE (4/61), the…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. A long-standing artist friend, whose work now commands high prices, has sent me out of the blue a present…
One who didn’t get away
Fedor Zan was 18, working on the river closing sluices, when, on a winter afternoon in 1942, he saw his…
Sceptic shock
I got Covid a couple of weeks ago. Second time for me, which was annoying because I’d told Caroline that…
Keys to the future
Any student of Chinese will sympathise with the 17th-century Jesuit priest Fr Emeric Langlois de Chavagnac when he wrote: ‘One…
Gathering storm
Whatever the result of Sue Gray’s report on ‘gatherings’ in Downing Street, there is a political lesson to be learned:…
Cooking up a storm
What is ‘immigrant food’? In America, the answer can be just about anything — from burritos to bibimbap to burgers.…
Barometer
Stumped again Were England always so hopeless playing Australia at cricket? Since the first match in 1877 there have been…
Confused lives
The Swiss writer Peter Stamm’s inscrutable, alienated outsiders make bizarre choices to escape stifling mundanity. Their discontent suggests malaise, something…
Chicken soup
Catherine Chicken is sickly. She has swollen up like a barrage balloon with an evil face and dinosaur feet. She…
Decline and fall
Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…
Letters
Beyond the party Sir: Rod Liddle is spot-on in arguing that the attitudes revealed by ‘partygate’ extend to senior civil…
