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Q. Our son and his girlfriend have announced their engagement and we are delighted with his choice. Our problem is…
Diary
Writers like me are used to long hours alone. I’ve never enjoyed that side of it. I don’t like the…
Songs to wash your hands by
In Competition No. 3141, you were invited to submit a song we cansing instead of ‘Happy Birthday’ during hand-washing. Congratulations…
Real life
‘Get me Heygates on the phone! I need that order of pony nuts now, damn it!’ It was like a…
Oxford has taught the no-platformers a lesson
Three weeks ago Amber Rudd travelled to Christ Church, Oxford, to speak to students about her experiences of being a…
How will this ‘war’ change us?
In the past ten days we have seen the greatest expansion of state power in British history. The state has…
Bridge
It was impossible to imagine, when I filed my column a fortnight ago, that I would be writing this one…
Puzzle no. 597
A puzzle used in the solving championship, composed by Vittorio de Barbieri in 1918. White must give mate in two…
Barley
‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood…
A battleground for archaeologists
Armageddon began as Har Megiddo, the Hill of Megiddo in northern Israel. The theological aspect is Christian. For Jews, ancient…
Working from home
Working from home has been on the rise for years. No one expected the latest surge to happen in the…
Creepy men everywhere
‘It’s a woman’s thing, creation,’ says Sarah,a girl accused of witchcraft in 18th-century Scotland, in one of the three storylines…
The world of make-believe is stranger than we realise
Last summer, in the bc era, I took my then three-year-old to a new group play session: ‘Lottie’s Magic Box.’…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus,’ says a discouraging headline in the Catholic Herald. Jesus ‘made the…
Closing time
War and plague have menaced theatres before, but rarely on this scale, says Lloyd Evans
On liberty
For days, the Prime Minister had been resisting the kind of measures which have placed many other countries into lockdown,…
Portrait of the week
Coronavirus Sunday dawned with 233 people in the United Kingdom dead thus far from the coronavirus Covid-19 (a week earlier…
Below the crisis, a question floats: ‘Where do we find purpose?’
Perhaps we are at least past the beginning of this crisis. The phase where the hunt for multipacks of loo-rolls…
A tale of two takeaways
I love eating while watching bad films like Battleship, so I love takeaway food from local restaurants. I am not…
Born to be wild
Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite…
