Breaking the cycle
For those with neither the time nor inclination to plough through a PhD in the intricacies of the scandals surrounding…
Dear Mary
Q. Before Covid, I was staying with friends in the country every other weekend. As a single man living in…
Package deal
Restaurant-goers who cannot let go of restaurants — for professional or other reasons — are floating on a sea of…
The imitation game
Copycat Hamiltons are everywhere. Lin-Manuel Miranda led the way by turning an unexamined corner of history into a smash-hit show.…
The Spectator’s Notes
The recently departed head of MI6, Sir Alex Younger, wants to balance China’s ideological antagonism to the West with the…
He loves me, he loves me not
The premise for the unsnappily titled Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is this: a Hungarian…
The C of E’s new religion
With a heavy heart I must return once more to the subject of the Church of England. I recognise that…
Puzzle no. 645
Black to play. Kosteniuk–Koneru, Skolkovo Grand Prix, 2019. The obvious 1…Kg3 fails to 2 Rg5+ Kf4 3 Rg4+. Losing the…
The politicisation of Sarah Everard’s death
A woman called Jenny Jones, now elevated to Baroness Moonbeam, or something, in the House of Lords has proposed a…
Bridge
If anyone is going to cause me agonies at the bridge table in front of 800 kibitzers by subjecting me…
Europe’s reckless caution
The first smear campaign against AstraZeneca, when Emmanuel Macron falsely claimed at the start of the year that the jab…
High life
Gstaad Some of you may have noticed that I have not commented at all about the ongoing soap opera and…
Minton tiles
It’s only since I moved to Staffordshire that I’ve come to appreciate that some of the finest works of public…
Slanging match
I’ve tried hard to think of someone I dislike enough to recommend this novel to, but have failed. Elfriede Jelinek…
Sacred space
‘This is the book that horses wish every equestrian would read,’ says the blurb for Sacred Spaces: Communion with the…
The Oscars
Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland,predicted to win big at this year’s Oscars, is not a terrible film. It’s a slight, sentimental Grapes…
to 2495: Contrary
Four unclued lights are places in Britain with MARY in their name. The remaining unclued lights can be linked with…
2498: Cross-country
The unclued lights are all non-words, but each can be resolved into a pair of thematic solutions. Across 1 Game…
In league with the devil
The most headline-grabbing of these three pop docs was Framing Britney Spears, part of the New York Times Presents documentary…
