Antiques Roadshow
It is one of life’s comforts to see a forgotten trinket being dusted off and appreciated afresh. So in chess,…
Private passions of a public moralist
Ruth Scurr reveals what an impulsive, life-loving individual Mary Wollstonecraft was
Raw Bacon
Francis Bacon once told the art critic Richard Cork: ‘I certainly hope I’ll go on till I drop dead.’ Max…
Crying for Latin America
It wasn’t so long ago that British readers, on hearing about the incompetence and corruption of Latin America’s political leaders,…
Laurels for Ardi
To comprehend ourselves and the future of humankind we have to understand where we came from. Unlike the approximately 350,000…
Unhealed wounds
At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his…
It’s that man again
Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw…
Grand disillusion
There is nothing in world sport, ‘nothing in the history of the human race’, Ramachandra Guha modestly reckons, that can…
Journey to the unknown
Narratives of frozen beards in polar hinterlands never lose their appeal. Most of the good stories have been told, but…
Prize wide open
Betraying the Nobel opens with a detonation from Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew. The vice-chairman and then chairman of the Nobel…
The fog of unknowing
It’s 1981 in Richmond, south-west London. Detective Inspector Henry Hobbes is called out to a rundown house where the octogenarian…
The secret history
Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk…
Low life
Although I was ten minutes early, Vernon was there ahead of me, framed in the ancient chapel doorway, chatting up…
Real life
Our battle with the EU has given me an insight into the parking disputes outside my house. Or is it…
The turf
Hearing that the Queen has both a real and an official birthday, a small boy asked the obvious question: ‘Does…
Superb but depraved
The Serpent is the best BBC drama series in ages — god knows how it slipped through the net —…
The end game
January 6, 2021 is a day that will live in infamy. On that day, our Capitol was assaulted by a…
The honorable Mike Pence
Who would want to have been in Vice President Mike Pence’s shoes on Wednesday? In recent weeks, the more manic…
Beijing revels in Washington’s chaos
The events on Capitol Hill were always going to be met with schadenfreude — perhaps even glee — among autocracies in…
Covid sparks a major incident in London
Is the NHS at risk of being overwhelmed? That’s a question of increasing concern in Westminster as hospital admissions rise. Sadiq Khan…
Beijing revels in Washington’s chaos
The events on Capitol Hill were always going to be met with schadenfreude — perhaps even glee — amongst autocracies…
Richard Sharp will not lead a BBC revolution
If you wanted to start a revolution would you choose an Oxford educated multi-millionaire banker to lead it? Not the…
Another ‘mostly peaceful’ day in the USA
As Talleyrand famously said after Napoleon’s international kidnap and subsequent execution of the royalist Duc d’Enghein, “it was worse than…
The healthcare backlog will be Boris Johnson’s next challenge
Boris Johnson’s coronavirus press briefing this evening was largely an upbeat discussion of how the vaccination programme is being rolled…
