The cost of Boris
Earlier this week, the Conservative party sent an appeal to its registered supporters asking them to become members. ‘We’re delivering…
Sublime – and ridiculous
It’s the final scene of The Valkyrie and Wotan is wearing cords. They’re a sensible choice for a hard-working deity:…
Game theory
The ‘globally outstanding’ University of Durham has plans to help its undergraduates who pay their way by prostituting themselves. Three…
Our old Macca
The Paul people are out in force these days. A New Yorker profile, a book and a new documentary have…
Barometer
Red Peppa? In a rambling speech to the CBI, Boris Johnson praised Peppa Pig. Has she changed political sides? Peppa…
Guilt-free hilarity
World-class sex bomb Janie Dee stars in a fabulously silly revival of the American comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha…
Christmas elves
I was 19 when I became a Hamleys elf. The closest thing I can compare it to is military service.…
Wild at heart
On 13 July 1815, John Constable wrote to his fiancée, Maria Bicknell, about this and that. Interspersed with a discussion…
Letters
Peace project Sir: It was heartening to read your editorial on the peace which has reigned in Europe since 1945,…
The Guinea Pig club
Lloyd Evans on a musical that tells the story of the pioneering maverick whose methods for treating disfigured second world war airmen revolutionised plastic surgery
Portrait of the week
Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, praised Peppa Pig in a speech to the Confederation of British Industry: ‘Who would’ve…
Real life
Surprise, surprise. The person who had the shield taken out of the street light so it shone back into my…
Ramp down
Language change outdoes nonsense, just as misbehaviour outdoes satire. In Through the Looking-Glass Alice mentions to the Gnat that, where…
Low life
After checking me in, the receptionist, who was wearing an overcoat, said: ‘There is no heating in the hotel. The…
Doctors at sea
Medicine was founded by Hippocrates in the 5th century BC. Doctors continued to study the Hippocratic texts into the 19th…
The Tories at sea
Ever since Boris Johnson’s disastrous decision to try to stay the standards committee’s guilty verdict against Owen Paterson, things have…
Lockdown creations
‘I may, one day, stop making notes and writing down recipes,’ Nigel Slater says in A Cook’s Book (Fourth Estate,…
Good old bad old days
After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based…
The bourgeois surrealist
René Magritte’s life, so outwardly respectable, was as full of surprises as his art, says Philip Hensher
Time and motion study
Since the publication of his debut, Remainder, Tom McCarthy has established himself as the Christopher Nolan of literary fiction: his…
A cruel affliction
Obsessed with purity and pain, the boundaries of blame and innocence, Skin is a fascinating meditation on psoriasis, the long-lasting…
The best of the Stuarts
Many girls dream about their favourite princesses. Elizabeth Stuart, a princess herself, took this fantasy a step further and modelled…
The world championship
‘Time to say Dubai,’ tweeted Magnus Carlsen, like some wry Bond villain, when he learned that the Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi…
Puzzle No. 681
White to play. Erigaisi–Liem, Tata Steel Rapid, 2021. Here 1 Rxf6? Qd1+ sees White getting mated on the back rank.…
‘A triumph of meandering’
This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian…