Why British weather is like a bad boyfriend
The British weather is just like the worst boyfriend. The kind that keeps you in a state of permanent insecurity…
Let’s hear your ‘logos’, Jeremy Corbyn
Jeremy Corbyn regularly apologises on the subject of anti-Semitism, yet admits that he has done nothing wrong. So what does…
Letters
Why we love Boris Sir: Stephen Robinson is right: Boris Johnson is not loathed outside the Westminster bubble (‘Brexit means Boris’,…
Why do we support the Iran regime when it is bitterly hostile to our way of life?
President Trump has ended US participation in the Iran deal and imposed sanctions. No doubt this is annoying to the…
Why is it that so many leading Brexiteers studied history?
What do Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Cummings all have in common? They are Brexiteers, of course. Yet little…
Why Boris is wrong about burkas
Were you aware that men who transition into women can suffer period pains, despite not having a uterus? Oh, they…
On a beach with no phone signal, I rediscovered the wonder of boredom
After an hour’s beach work I was just about done. I’d read some book, I’d skimmed the papers, I’d eaten…
It’s time to accept that companies such as Amazon are beyond shame
‘There has to be a level playing field so that… Amazon cannot undercut domestic booksellers by using the tax advantage…
Why are modern men obsessed with self-improvement?
My friend recently met a man on a dating app and went out for dinner with him. When he arrived,…
What do women really want? A man with a beautiful house
Freud famously asked: what do women want? And I think that after two marriages, a dozen long-term relationships and a…
Britain should spend more on diplomacy in Africa and less on aid
It is a tragedy that the party that has ruined Zimbabwe, led by a man who was one of the…
Baseball is perfect. Don’t make it all about race.
Los Angeles Baseball is the best American sport. It’s great because it’s timeless — it exists in a space beyond…
Root out ragwort!
A sea of bright yellow flowers in a sun- drenched meadow… what could be more idyllic? Sadly, all that glisters…
Amateur porn is not empowering
If ever you find yourself bored and with 15 minutes to spare, I recommend looking up Pornhub’s annual report, the…
Make Rosé Pink Again!
When we first moved to the Languedoc, the less poncey part of the south of France nearly 20 years ago,…
British street names: short, simple and unpretentious
You know where you are with a British street name. I don’t mean literally. I mean there’s a tacit humility…
The perfect guide to a book everyone should read
‘The Divine Comedy is a book that everyone ought to read,’ according to Jorge Luis Borges, and every Italian has…
The selective breeding of pets: how far should we go?
It was in his play Back to Methuselah that George Bernard Shaw honoured a lesser known aspect of Charles Darwin’s…
‘We are not cattle, we’re people’: everyday hell in Stalin’s labour camps
‘No testimony from this time must ever be forgotten,’ the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova says in his afterword to…
The unknown Auden: the poet’s dashing brother
A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater,…
2018: a year of dangerous liaisons with Russia
First it was McMafia. After which it was the Skripals. Then the World Cup. Come the end of the year…
Brazil: a country fizzing with excitement
As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be…
It happened one summer: Bitter Orange, by Claire Fuller, reviewed
Approaching her death, and the end of Claire Fuller’s third novel, Frances Jellico — for the most part a stickler…
Music’s Brexit
It’s October 1895 and the spirit of Music has been absent from Britain for exactly 200 years. Why she fled,…
Full of bog-standard, if annoyingly effective, emotional manipulation: The Foreign Doctors Are Coming reviewed
Surprising I know, but judging from The Foreign Doctors Are Coming (Channel 4, Tuesday), Britain mightn’t be such a bad…
