Puzzle No. 674
White to play. Mamedyarov–Artemiev, MeltwaterChampions Final 2021. Black’s last move, was Ra8-a4, attacking the pawn on g4. But it allowed…
Bridge
One of my favourite Bridge proverbs is ‘Play the card you’re known to hold’. It doesn’t mean we should blithely…
Boris offers a hostage to fortune
Most prime ministers would be worried about supply chain shortages. But as became increasingly clear at the Tory party conference…
2527: The main dilemma
Three unclued lights together form an eight-word question from a well-known song. The song’s protagonist suggests the other five unclued…
We should never have been in Afghanistan
Two important studies have been published this autumn on the apparent failure of our almost 20-year war in Afghanistan. In…
To 2524: Spelean II
The quotation is ‘I DO WISH THOU WERT A [dog] THAT I MIGHT LOVE THEE SOMETHING’. The honest servant is…
A devilish assignment
It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…
Follow the science
In Competition No. 3219, you were invited to supply clerihews on well-known scientists, past and present. The subject of the…
Nature in the round
As the start date of COP26 draws closer, and just when we are assailed by daily proof of climate chaos,…
Chess sets
Since tennis matches are decided in sets, they are sometimes won by the player who has won fewer games. For…
Pernicious patriarchy
UK grassroots feminism is flourishing at the moment, with the journalist Julie Bindel leading from the front as troublemaker-in-chief. In…
A delicate bargain
This very readable account of relations between the British intelligence services and the Crown does more than it says on…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. An acquaintance suggested organising a celebratory dinner in honour of some mutual friends. He asked my husband and me,…
Speed and stealth
Fast boats and fast women have been the ruin of many a poor boy. But they can also prove a…
The full spectrum
Honor Clerk explores the history of the world through colour, from the Stone Age to orbiting the Moon
Strength through adversity
We had been dreading it like (forgive me) the plague: the inevitable onslaught of corona-lit. Fortunately, the first few titles…
Real life
The filling station on the road out of the village was like a scene from Mad Max. People were all…
Chasing nostalgia
The true English disease is Downton Syndrome. Symptoms include a yearning for a past of chivalry, grandeur and unambiguously stratified…
When the stars align
We were in deepest Dorset, l’Angleterre profonde. The weather was also typically English: inundations followed by counter-attacks from the Indian…
The Tories will pay a price for Boris’s housing strategy
One of the themes of Conservative conference was that the government has dropped plans for a radical reform of the…
If a cabinet minister can pay his legals why not ABC journalists?
In the national capital the most-used greeting is usually not “How are you?” but “What have you heard?” Canberra is…
Greta Thunberg didn’t win the German elections
Greta Thunberg is back in business. Previously slowed down by European pandemic restrictions, the Fridays For Future movement has now…
Dominic Perrottet puts responsible government, not unelected bureaucrats, first
I can hardly believe it. The new Premier of New South Wales, Dominic Perrottet, appeared at a press conference yesterday…
