Comfort eating
Brasserie Zédel is a grand salon under Piccadilly Circus and the only place I desired when lockdown (or lock-in) ceased…
High life
Gstaad Are any of you tired of reading about Ghislaine Maxwell and her sleazy life? Bored by old news repeated…
Low life
They are starting to cut the corn. But apart from combine harvesters and tractors, the roads up here on the…
Portrait of the Week
Home New regulations would compel people to wear a face covering in shops in England from 24 July on pain…
Real life
‘What are you going to put on my head to protect me?’ said the man outside the barber’s shop to…
Glasto and Glynders
In Competition No. 3157 you were invited to describe a visit to Glastonbury or Glyndebourne in the style of an…
Dear Mary
Q. As we attend socially distant events, we expect of our hosts a scrupulous accommodation of our preferences around physical…
My fears for my church have been realised
The only memorable argument I have ever heard in that tedious debate about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic came from…
Barometer
Take cover The government has said it will make wearing masks compulsory in shops. Mandatory masks rather run against the…
Solution to 2463: Tongue Twisters
The unclued lights were all languages which are written from right to left, entered in that manner in the grid.…
Bridge
The French Online Open, in which 32 teams competed over a marathon two weeks — seven days round robin and…
2466: Gender bender
Clockwise round the grid from 11 run, in chronological order, the titles (7,7,7,9,2,8,2,10) of five works by an author whose…
An ugly duckling problem
The position shown in this week’s main diagram is the starter problem for the Winton British Chess Solving Championship, an…
Puzzle no. 613
White to play and mate in three moves. A problem composed by grandmaster Jonathan Levitt (British Chess Magazine, 1995). One…
What’s the world coming to?
It wasn’t until half way through Jenny Kleeman’s Sex Robots and Vegan Meat that I was able to put my…
She was just a damn cat – and I loved her
I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep…
Will black voters abandon the Democrats in 2024?
Joe Biden owes his nomination to black Democrats, who never joined the revolution led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, closed ranks…
Trump has been right about China for years
Back in the summer of 2015, all the cleverest people made fun of Donald Trump for obsessing about China. One…
Is this the sanest debate on race yet?
The race debate is rapidly descending into a one-note diatribe where white accountability has become the only game in town.…
Should we forgive Lauren Southern?
As a society, we have become exceptionally bad at forgiveness. How much does anyone really deserve? Are they remorseful? What…
