History at Hastings
The Hastings International Chess Congress hasn’t skipped a year since the second world war, so I was delighted to learn…
God’s architects
The surroundings of the Crimea Memorial Church in Istanbul are ‘little better than a dump’, wrote the British embassy chaplain…
The invisible man
Of the handful of things we can establish about Willis Wu, the protagonist of Charles Yu’s second novel, the most…
The cowboy and the cop
Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is back. This is a York novel, or rather a Yorkshire crime novel. The LNER railway…
A burnt-out case
Those who best remember Dr Anthony Clare (1942-2007) for his broadcasting are firmly reminded by this biography that we didn’t…
Cruelty and chaos
Karachi, Pakistan’s troubled heart, is known to cast a seductive spell over residents and visitors alike. In Karachi Vice, the…
Shades of meaning
This is a big book about a minor painting — a double portrait of John Bankes, aged about 16 (the…
Only revolution will do
After the death of George Floyd last year, and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests around the world, racism is…
The art of the steal
Making one’s fortune in Occupied Paris was largely a matter of knowing the right people: in fact, the further to…
Bridge
When lockdown began, all those months ago, I remember chatting to a few of England’s top players about the shift…
Low life
Here, as in Britain, everyone is a log expert. The woodman leaves a heap at the bottom of the drive…
Real life
Not long after he took on a smallholding for his cobs, the builder boyfriend found a couple walking through his…
The turf
Doing good doesn’t always work out as expected. A regular entering his local pub takes pity on an old lady…
Perfectly pointless
‘What the world needs now is a black and white pastiche of classic 1950s and 1960s sitcoms reviving two Marvel…
She Who Must Not Be Named
Australia’s greatest tennis player turned Christian minister is vilified every January for daring to hold a traditional view of marriage…
Joe Biden’s ‘harmony’ is curiously divisive
It is a truism that while it takes much time and patience to build up a civilization, those achievements can…
Has Covid killed the EU’s dream of open borders?
‘All non-essential travel should be strongly discouraged both within the country and of course across borders,’ Ursula von der Leyen,…
Has the current wave peaked?
Yesterday, the news was dominated by Imperial College’s React study which suggested – in contrast to the fall in recorded…
Is it all over for the Tokyo Olympics?
Any long-term resident of Japan will know that ‘reading the air’, as the locals put it, is an essential skill…
So what can we say about the Podium Poet?
So let’s talk about the poetry thing and the poet who read poetry at the inauguration. America’s National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman who recited the…
Australia versus Google
The out-going Trump administration finally woke up to a nasty little rort that the Australian government was planning on running…
Will Australia face carbon tariffs under the Biden regime?
Day 1 of the Biden Presidency saw the reversal of several of the Trump administration’s environmental policies, including tighter vehicle emissions standards, a moratorium on oil and natural…
