July 2018 could prove to be Theresa May’s cruellest month
Theresa May is about to embark on the toughest month of her premiership to date. Next week, she must persuade…
There’s a reason restaurants everywhere are failing: Red Hen Syndrome
Anxious to find out what food they served at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, I clicked on the…
My encounter with the self-righteous cry-bullies of Cambridge
There’s a Tracey Ullman comedy sketch about the extreme and ugly form of political correctness afflicting the youth. It’s set…
Carmakers are an undeniable voice in the Brexit debate
The voice of business has been all but silent in the Brexit debate ever since former Marks & Spencer boss…
Angela’s ashes: Merkel’s grand project is crumbling
‘This is not about whether Mrs Merkel stays as chancellor next week or not,’ said Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister…
Mass immigration has destroyed hopes of a borderless society
What kind of a president would build a wall to keep out families dreaming of a better life? It’s a…
The great nanny shortage
There is an au pair drought in the UK. Since the 2016 Referendum there has been a 75 per cent…
Donald Trump’s Space Force isn’t so stupid
Americans traumatised by their current president could be forgiven for thinking that his demand for a ‘space force’ was about…
Fifa may be corrupt but it has done wonders for football
In 1930, Jules Rimet, the creator of the Football World Cup, crossed the Atlantic in a steamship to attend the…
Travel phobia is perfectly reasonable
I have never been an adventurous soul. As an infant in Belfast, I would lie motionless for hours on the…
Who really wants to read feminist children’s books?
A friend of mine who commissions book reviews has added a sub-category to the list of titles coming up: ‘femtrend’,…
The spying game: when has espionage changed the course of history?
Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple…
Foreign bodies galore: the best new crime fiction
Ghosts of the Past by Marco Vichi (Hodder, £18.99) is unashamedly nostalgic in tone. The title could not be more…
Crudo, by Olivia Laing, reviewed
Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring…
Staggering to Jerusalem — a journey from darkness into light
Guy Stagg walked 5,500 km from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths, and he records the expedition in The…
Has Tibet finally lost out to China?
Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover…
The modern celebrity silk: Geoffrey Robertson ticks all the boxes
What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job…
The great outdoors is a short walk from your front door
When I read about the author on the flyleaf of this book, I must admit my heart sank: ‘Tristan has…
The new biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler is a real labour of loathing
The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been…
Can democracy survive the tidal wave of technological progress?
For a brief moment in 2011, standing among thousands of people occupying Syntagma, the central square in Athens, it looked…
A Weekend in New York, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed
I wrote foul-mouthed marginalia throughout Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York. Not because Markovits is a bad writer —…
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…
Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
For someone who is only 47 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Sean Greer certainly knows how to get…
A love letter to the short story
On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a…
The industrial kling-klang of ‘Krautrock’
The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones…
