Blacktivists ignore the real plight of indigenous Australia
Virtue-signalling, woke demonstrations are misplaced
Richard Tognetti
This week the Australia Chamber Orchestra should have been delighting audiences with their usual brilliant performances to celebrate the 30th…
The horse has bolted and the emperor has no clothes
On the greatest act of political misfeasance in our history
Barometer
The Colston chronicles Who, exactly, was Sir Edward Colston? Colston was born into a family of merchants and spent the…
Puzzle no. 608
Black to play, Ding Liren–Daniil Dubov, Lindores Abbey Rapid Challenge, May 2020. Dubov’s rook is under attack, but his next…
Bridge
Have you ever been at a bridge event and heard someone exclaim: ‘He Grosvenor’d me!’ They are referring to a…
Lindores Abbey online
The Lindores Abbey Distillery in Fife, Scotland was an idyllic setting for an exciting rapid event last year, won by…
Diary
A lockdown diary is an oddly negative thing. At the dinner parties that we aren’t going to, we aren’t discussing…
Child of nature
Dara McAnulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland. He has autism; so do his brother, sister and mother —…
Middle-aged thrills
Beth, the protagonist of Joanna Briscoe’s The Seduction, reminded me of Clare in Tessa Hadley’s debut, Accidents in the Home.…
All things considered
What does Jony Ive, the designer of Apple’s iPhone, have in common with Peter Perez Burdett, the first Englishman to…
Northern noir
It is winter in north Yorkshire. On the brink of New Year, Jake, a laconic, isolated former farmhand in his…
Silent witnesses
History is only as good as its sources. It is limited largely to what has survived of written records, and…
Prepared for the worst
This book could not have been published at a better time — nor, in a way, at a worse time.…
Feeling left behind
In her 2010 novel So Much for That, Lionel Shriver examined the American healthcare system with a spiky sensitivity. Big…
Reports of its death are exaggerated
These days the world seems to end with staggering regularity. From the financial crisis to Brexit to Trump to a…
Domestic bliss?
In Competition No. 3152 you were invited to supply a poem about the joys — or otherwise — of the…
Walnut whips and Stafford Cripps
The National Theatre’s programme of livestreamed shows continues with the Donmar’s 2014 production of Coriolanus starring Tom Hiddleston. The play…
Take back control
There is a grim inevitability to the trickle of round-robin letters from scientists who feel aggrieved at the government’s handling…
