At 62, I’m looking for a hole in a rock
Towering above this medieval French village is dun-coloured cliff of volcanic rock, dramatically floodlit at night, topped by two ancient…
Stefano is a tonic, and I love him
Stefano came back to paint the front of the house. I have never been so pleased to see his red…
Wild life
Maasai Mara Last night the hyenas made off with our fudge cake. We are camped with a group of…
Bridge
It’s hard to explain to non-bridge players just how all-consuming this game is. For those of us who move in…
Fiend from Hull
This year’s British Championship commences today in Hull. Among a powerful field, which includes Michael Adams and defending champion Gawain…
no. 516
Black to play. This position is from Brown-Adams, British Championship, Bournemouth 2016. Black has various ways to force mate but…
Tourist misinformation
In Competition No. 3058 you were invited to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or…
2369: Prodigious
Each of ten clues contains a misprinted letter in the definition part. Corrections of misprints spell a word which can…
to 2366: The square
THE RUSSIA HOUSE, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and A MURDER OF QUALITY are novels by JOHN (41) LE CARRÉ, whose…
War and monsters: my new favourite author
If you’re looking for a good beach read this summer, look no further. A few weeks ago I was reading…
A friendly purr from a fallible Tiger Woods
So in the end it was a fallible Tiger that won all hearts at the Open, not the glowering, red-shirted…
Dear Mary: How can we make an ungrateful relative acknowledge a £500 cheque?
Q. My wife’s much younger sister is lazy and impossible. She forgets birthdays, is invariably late, lets people down and…
The parking is better than the food: Nando’s reviewed
Nando’s, c. 1987, is a restaurant in the Great North Leisure Park, Finchley, N12, off the North Circular, which is my…
Mind your language: County lines
We are suddenly all expected to know that county lines are to do with the selling of illegal drugs in…
Art Notes
Every now and again, a friend of mine holds a ‘what’s your unpopular opinion?’ discussion in a club we jointly…
Anti-‘Zionism’, or just plain old…?
Anti-‘Zionism’ seems to be bustin’ out all over. The Presbyterian Church USA, has become one of the more noisome sinks…
Brown study
Poor Malcolm Turnbull gets such a bad press that it is good to have an opportunity to congratulate him on…
Letter from Munich
As a permanent reminder of the fragility of democracy when put under the combined pressure of economic crisis and populist…
Latham’s law
Before his death in July 1826, Thomas Jefferson wrote the epitaph for his own gravestone and insisted it carry ‘not…
Polishing Maggie’s legacy
Everywhere you look, from the free market to intelligence agencies, core democratic institutions are under attack – be it from…
Dear Paul
Three major articles by the Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly, and Tony Abbott’s even more major Heritage Foundation speech in Washington,…
Peterson’s sin
Last week I wanted to move to a hut in the wilderness, as far away from people as possible. The…
If the Libs don’t represent the right, someone else will
Among political insiders, I detect some relief that the two-party-preferred Newspoll gap between the Turnbull government and the Shorten opposition…
John Russell
Once he was known as ‘Australia’s lost impressionist’ and referred to as John Peter Russell. Now at the Art Gallery…
