Wild life
As we all know by now, the pandemic distorts time like a concertina. Life before March is a world that…
Small miracles
If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy…
Real Life
My friend turned up wearing a snorkelling mask, beneath which she had tied a bandana around her mouth. On her…
Ghoulish entertainment
Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration…
High life
Gstaad A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had…
Fair women and brave men
History is full of ‘ifs’ and the Spartan story fuller than most. If the 300 had not made their famous…
The great pretender
In the past Werner Herzog has given us a man pushing a ship up a mountain, a 16th-century conquistador going…
The censorship spiral
It’s open season on mavericks and dissenters at the moment. If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of…
Creative destruction
For three months art lovers have had nothing but screens to look at. As one New York dealer complained to…
Entrepreneurship – not Johnson’s New Deal – will lead us back to prosperity
John Maynard Keynes looks down and smiles, recalling his own perhaps too-often quoted remark that ‘when the facts change, I…
Family matters
What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so…
Starmer has already reshaped Labour
For the first time in 13 years, the public, when polled, think a Labour leader would make the best prime…
The chilling effect
The printed press is not a natural ally of Facebook. Silicon Valley publishers have hoovered up so much advertising that…
Rhyme and reason
‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds…
Online chess
How have you been filling these listless homebound hours we’ve been given by the government? I’ve been frittering them away…
Letters
Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies,…
Author’s Notebook
From the balcony where I take my daily exercise there is a view of the commercial centre of London that…
Portrait of the Week
Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said he was ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’ and did press-ups to prove…
Puzzle no. 611
White to play. From the ridiculous to the sublime. According to the ‘Chess Notes’ website, a game won by Edward…
2464: Topsy-turvy
14 which is unclued below, but is clued elsewhere, has to be divided into three components (one a Spanish…
