to 2491: Recycling
The ten unclued lights comprise the seven primary Wombles, best known for their recycling of objects found on Wimbledon Common.…
Mixed messages
In Competition No. 3186 you were invited to supply an acrostic poem praising or dispraising a public figure, in which…
Bridge
In general, I don’t like to play bridge just for fun: I prefer the cut-throat atmosphere of a tournament, or…
He who hesitates…
If there was one ingredient which separated the two finalists of the Opera Euro Rapid, it was confidence. The third…
Barometer
Target practice The government hit its target of giving a first Covid vaccine to 15 million of the most vulnerable…
My advice for the next ‘free speech champion’
I was delighted to hear the government plans to appoint a ‘free speech champion’ to the board of the Office…
Navalny vs the emperors
A Roman emperor would consider the tyrant Putin’s treatment of Alexei Navalny’s supporters as foolish but, looking at Russia as…
Three plots for the price of one
ZeroZeroZero is the impossibly exciting new drugs series from Roberto Saviano — the author who gave us perhaps my all-time…
Portrait of the Week
Home The target was achieved of vaccinating, by the middle of February, about 15 million people of 70 or over,…
Low life
Every Friday afternoon the foreign correspondent and I attend a French lady’s home for our one-hour French lesson. The foreign…
On life and liberty
When the Prime Minister sets out his ‘roadmap’ for easing Covid restrictions on Monday, it will be against a backdrop…
Moi… Lolita
Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs…
From screen to stage
It’s my new lockdown ritual. Switch on the telly, cue up the menu and scroll down to where the vintage…
And then there were three
Lara Feigel tells of the passion, pain and sexual exploitation involved in Elizabeth Bowen’s affair with a young married scholar
Tact and tactics
The 17th-century diplomat Sir Henry Wotton said that an ambassador was ‘an honest man sent to lie abroad for his…
The tarnished city on the hill
With its grim John le Carré atmosphere, communist Eastern Europe in the late 1980s was a melancholy, out-at-elbow place. The…
Not long for this Erth
‘Challenging stuff,’ my wife remarked, having alighted on the page of Paul Kingsnorth’s new novel in which a character named…
Real life breaks in
Some writers — Jane Austen, for example — get to funny sideways, using irony and understatement. The American poet and…
Rocks of ages
There has been an argument recently on Twitter about how to do nature-writing. Should it involve the self? Should it…
When poison is the cure
Who Poisoned Your Bacon Sandwich?is a much more sophisticated read than its lurid English title suggests. Guillaume Coudray’s book was…
Britain’s battle to prevent ‘green protectionism’
The UK’s commitment to get to net zero by 2050 is going to require some difficult political choices. But it…
The problem with the Supreme Court’s Uber ruling
They are monitored by the firm. They don’t have the option of working for other companies. And they are entitled…
Iran’s missile diplomacy
It’s a time for delivering messages in the Middle East, where messages rarely come without their near constant attendant: violence.…
