My life as a dogsbody
Even a small dog can be quite high maintenance. No, I’m not talking about Mali, our one-year-old cavapoochon, but Bertie,…
Peckham wry
Keith Ridgway’s seventh book is a sultry, steamy shock of a novel, not least because nine years ago, despite the…
Riding high
Think of a punishing distance for a bike race. Double it, multiply by ten, throw in two of the world’s…
Puzzle no. 661
Black to play. Daggupati–Mishra, Charlotte 2020. 1…Rf1+ 2 Kg2 is a dead end, as White’s queen covers the f2 square.…
Let yourself go
When she was 22, Olivia Laing had a sensual epiphany in Brighton. She’d been drawn into a herbalist’s massage parlour…
The places that make us
In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was…
Disappointment all round
When I interviewed Paul Theroux 21 years ago at his home in Hawaii, there were already rumours that his ex-wife…
Knocking on Shakespeare’s door
I have the habit, when reading a collection of essays, of not reading them in order. I’m pretty sure I’m…
A terrible beauty
Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but…
Ode to LA
Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the…
A fully engaged life
From Bengali schoolboy to citizen of the world – Amartya Sen’s autobiography is a joy, says Philip Hensher
Universal
In Competition No. 3206, you were invited to supply a sonnet on the universe. The late Frank Kermode reckoned that…
Boris Johnson’s survival rests on reforming Whitehall
More than 40 years after it was written there are still lines in Yes Minister that are painfully accurate about how…
Have Southgate’s England lost their moral compass?
Back in the 1980s the BBC Match of the Day opening credits featured a clip of Manchester United winger Mickey…
The SpecOz: afflicting the comfortable, comforting the afflicted. Or something similar
I appear to have hurt the feelings of a very powerful union. About three weeks ago, I wrote a piece…
Now more than ever small business needs to be paid on time
My heart was gladdened recently by the spectacular collapse of Greensill Capital, once a darling of the financial and (some) political elites in Australia and Britain. I…
The invisible man
Here’s a screenshot of the Flat White email inbox from earlier this morning. Might the PM’s minders have finally realised…
Travel quarantine scrapped for double-jabbed
International travel rules will be relaxed on 19 June as part of the wider scrapping of social distancing rules and masks.…
