Mover and shaker
As Lionel Barber recounts unrolling his pitch to replace me as editor of the Financial Times to the newspaper’s proprietor…
A fine bromance
This book has appeared with no fuss or fanfare and yet by any account it is something of a scoop.…
Restless spirit
Sybille Bedford died in 2006, just short of 95. She left four novels, a travel book, two volumes of legal…
Natural order
The ancients knew nothing about global warming, but they still reflected on the relationship between man and nature. In the…
Diary
American expats have a conundrum on election night: do you stay up to watch the results come in or do…
Bass notes
It’s a good day to stab something and tear out its heart. Elaine Lorys is the only female master fishmonger…
Portrait of the Week
Home The government imposed a lockdown on England to last until 2 December. On television, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister,…
Sit back and enjoy the spectacle ahead
‘At least there’s sport,’ said the woman in the supermarket queue. True enough, and in a welcome sop to an…
Singing the blues
A second lockdown won’t cause me much suffering. I don’t have a shop selling ‘non-essential’ goods (e.g. books) that will…
A lockdown too far
The benefit of having a lockdown announced some days in advance is the ability to savour what is about to…
Puzzle no. 629
White to play and mate in 3. A puzzle featured in The Queen’s Gambit, apparently composed by W. Atkinson in…
An ego the size of Botswana
It’s touch and go whether the theatre will survive this latest assault. Some venues have pushed back their entire programme…
Barometer
The start of lockdown The earliest known use of ‘lockdown’ in its current sense was in a 1973 story in…
Trick or treat
The timing couldn’t be better. Just as the gates clang shut on another national lockdown, trapping us all indefinitely with…
There is no Santa Claus, Sir Patrick
It seems, then, that this latest lockdown has been instigated simply to protect two very questionable institutions — the National…
Lamb to the slaughter
The Slightly Foxed podcast, like the quarterly and old bookshop of the same name, is almost muskily lovely. It’s the…
Bridge
How many times have we had it hammered into us: ‘When dummy goes down, plan the play’? Well, if we…
Return of the Christmas Elves
We have a fine crop of Christmas gift books this year, so good that some of them actually qualify as…
Rhapsody in blue
When Carlos Acosta was named artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet in January of this year, he announced ambitious plans…
