Two by two
Mothballed since March when it danced a farewell Swan Lake, the Royal Ballet made a triumphant and joyous return to…
Haunted by Hitchcock
Rebecca is a new adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s gothic, twisted, never-out-of-print tale of sexual jealousy. It’s directed by Ben…
Panto at Glyndebourne
Offenbach at Glyndebourne! Short of Die Soldaten with a picnic break or a period-instrument revival of Jerry Springer: The Opera,…
The turf
Fortunately for me and the politicians we entertained over my years covering the darkest profession, Mrs Oakley didn’t do a…
A conspiracy against art
Southwark Playhouse has revived an American show, The Last Five Years, whose run was cancelled in March. In advance, I…
Legion of Babel
During the Spanish civil war of 1936 to 1939, 35,000 men and women from around the world volunteered to fight…
Irritable male syndrome
By my reckoning, this is the 24th outing for John Rebus, Scotland’s best known retired police officer. One of the…
Dublin pub crawl
Far be it from me to utter a word against the patron saint of Dublin pubs, Roddy Doyle. Granted he’s…
Bridge
‘I have a wonderful hand to show you,’ Gunnar Hallberg exclaimed when I saw him last week. Gunnar is a…
On a knife-edge with Stanley
Twenty-five years after making Spartacus, a parable of Roman decadence and rebellious slaves shot in California, Stanley Kubrick made Full…
Winkles
For the first time in 30-odd years, many Brits have started eating winkles again. Unable to holiday abroad this summer,…
A united kingdom
When the Black Lives Matter protests struck London in the same week that Public Health England published a report into…
Get yourself to Sweden – while you still can
An idea gains ground that we shouldn’t go abroad any more: that the very act of travelling without urgent reason…
Chess players on ice
We are what we do. Alas, in its zeal to suppress the virus, this government would have many people doing…
Puzzle no. 626
Rapport–Sprenger, Bundesliga, September 2020. The game continued 1 Bxc4 Rxc4 2 Bxe5+ f6 3 Bf4 Rxe4+ 4 Kf3 and was…
Who speaks for Boris?
A spokeswoman has been appointed ‘to communicate with the nation on behalf of the Prime Minister’. He apparently needs ‘a…
2479: Shielded
The unclued lights (one of two words and one hyphened) are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. Across 10 United…
Letters
Wind worries Sir: You are right to side with the 2013 version of Boris Johnson, when he claimed that wind…
What I got wrong about lockdown
The news that residents of Liverpool are not allowed to visit any other cities in the UK is a hammer…
Solution to 2476: Playtime
The unclued lights form pairs of famous soloists and the instruments they play; 1A/19, 5/34, 23/8, 31/39, 43/16A. First prize…
