A blast from the past
Halfway through what must count as one of the more esoteric quests, Jennifer Lucy Allan finds herself on a hill…
L and M
A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that…
Birds of a feather
This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness…
The bare essentials
Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading: ‘Dichten = condensare.’ Meaning poetry is intensification, ‘the most concentrated form of verbal expression’.…
A dog’s life
‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cat videos,’ begins Henry Mance’s How to Love Animals, winningly.…
Ai-Da Vinci
Stuart Jeffries discusses beauty, Yoko Ono and the world’s disappointments with the first robot artist
Touchy feely
Rodin’s studio at Meudon in the suburbs of Paris is huge and filled with light — a sort of combined…
Skins in togas
I’ve been looking at the reviews so far of Sky’s new Romans series Domina and none seems to have noticed…
Tales of the mild West
A terrible thing, to be torn. Last Sunday was International Day to End Obstetric Fistula, a very painful condition affecting…
Live and kicking
There is a reason music writers tend to stick with music writing rather than transferring their manifold talents to the…
Land of milk and money
Kelly Reichardt’s First Cowstars John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, and a Jersey cow listed in the credits as ‘Evie’,…
A tragedy of errors
It is hard to deny the importance of the issues raised this week by Dominic Cummings. His decision to identify…
Barometer
Marrying in office It was announced Boris Johnson will marry his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, next year. This will be only…
Daredevil kings
The fifth match game between Potter and Zukertort, played in London in 1875, saw a dogged struggle. The final position…
Puzzle No. 655
White to play, Kharlov–Ernst, Haninge 1992. Black’s last move, g6-g5 was a decisive mistake. Which move did White play to…
Canterbury revisited
In Competition No. 3200, you were invited to retell one of Chaucer’s tales in the style of another author. The…
2508: Grovels
The unclued lights, (one pair, one hyphened and one of two words) are of a kind. One clue leads to…
Portrait of the Week
Home The BBC was engulfed in doubts after a report by Lord Dyson blamed Martin Bashir for deceiving the late…
Diary
In the New York Times, the celebrated journalist Maureen Dowd describes Crieff as ‘a sleepy town in Scotland’. Well. There…
