Puzzle no. 598
A variation from the game above. Although White is a pawn down, he can rustle up decisive counterplay with one…
Low life
With my signed and dated laissez-passer in my pocket, I trotted down to the village to see if I could…
Was it ever a symbol of unity?
From the kitchen of her apartment on the Quai de la Tournelle in Paris, the journalist and broadcaster Agnès Poirier…
High life
Look at it this way: we’re all doing Desert Island Discs nowadays, and unless you’ve got the bug, it’s a…
Explorer’s Notebook
I arrived on Novolazarevskaya base on the northern coast of Antarctica in a Russian plane, flown by an ex-USSR air…
Hens
Is there nothing people won’t panic-buy during this crisis? Having stripped shelves of food and toilet roll, shoppers are now…
Haydn seek
As Joseph Haydn was getting out of bed on the morning of 10 May 1809, a cannonball landed in his…
Lower house prices and cheaper fuel will help recovery
The suspension of the residential property market is disheartening for those who were hoping to buy a first flat or…
The fascinating Ms Swift
There had been some question about whether Taylor Swift’s Netflix special would actually appear. Last year it seemed that the…
The spiritual richness of solitude
A psychiatrist once told me that it takes one’s subconscious about three weeks to catch up with a significant life…
Rules of engagement
With theatres shut, radio must lighten the darkness. The Guilty Feminist is a wildly popular podcast performed by Deborah Frances-White…
Don’t let anyone tell you there’s a war on
‘Shut up — don’t you know there’s a war on?’ Strong hints of that attitude have emerged in recent weeks,…
Race relations
Some years ago I was invited to the British Grand Prix at Silverstone courtesy of a watch manufacturer. As freebies…
Letters
Corona mysteries Sir: John Lee highlights the issue of dying of seasonal flu vs dying of coronavirus when assessing attributable…
Captive audience
This film contains flying children, time travel and a sand monster that lives under a beach — yet the most…
Diary
‘How are you bearing up?’ ‘Is everyone terrified?’ ‘What’s the mood?’ These are the questions concerned family and friends are…
Museums of the mind
Six months ago I published a book about travelling to look at works of art. One such journey involved a…
Testing times
The failures of Britain’s pandemic planning have been brutally exposed in the past few weeks. The scandalous lack of protective…
A world apart
Holed up in her sixth-floor London flat, Laura Freeman finds solace in the art of the hermit
A stranger to herself
How can you recover the teenage girl you were? Not just recall the memories and recount the events — this…
Grief fills the room up
Maggie O’Farrell is much possessed by death. Her first novel, After You’d Gone (2000), chronicled the inner life of a…
A family in a billion
Don Galvin and Mimi Blayney married in December 1944. It was a shotgun wedding. They had been high school sweethearts.…
An unexamined life
Micah Mortimer, the strikingly unproactive protagonist of Anne Tyler’s 23rd novel, is a man of such unswerving routine that his…
