Cancer? I wouldn’t have missed it for the world
Homesick for England, family and friends, I flew back, and the next day went for a long walk with my…
The hidden costs of dogging
Every day in every way we are paying for more and more. I realise this increasingly. Things we took for…
How to handle fickle racehorse owners
On the famed Whitsbury gallops, as corn buntings and stonechats fluttered from the fence posts, a dozen of Marcus Tregoning’s…
Bridge
Ostend has been host to hundreds of bridge players representing their various countries in the European Teams Championships. The ten-day…
Altibox
Fabiano Caruana has won the elite Altibox tournament ahead of world champion Magnus Carlsen. This result might appear to give…
Puzzle no. 511
White to play. This position is a variation from So-Carlsen, Norway Chess 2018. The world champion suffered a reverse in…
#MeToo lit
In Competition No. 3053, an assignment prompted by Anthony Horowitz’s reflections on creating female characters for his latest Bond novel,…
2364: Frolicsome Threesome
2/11/12 is a four-word quotation in Chambers. Remaining unclued lights (all appropriate to the language the quotation is in) are…
to 2361: Snoot
The unclued lights are anagrams of the names of Scottish towns. Dalry (12), Dundee (14)), Brechin (27), Kelso (1D), Peterhead…
This junk study proves nothing about helicopter parenting
An academic paper by a group of child psychologists caused a stir earlier this week. ‘Helicopter parenting is bad for…
Is taste all in the mind? Louse crap says it is
An Iranian friend of mine recently brought me some gaz from Isfahan. Commonly known as Persian nougat, gaz is perhaps…
Dear Mary: I’m a freelancer – how do I get people to return my calls?
Q. Being professionals in trade, we find ourselves increasingly being asked by friends, who could well afford to use our…
Weak but stable, Theresa May is the opposite of a good claret
It is enough to make a man turn to drink. On a distinctly non-abstemious day, I was sitting in one…
‘Iteration’ has escaped from the computer shops
‘They should say, irritation, not iteration,’ exclaimed my husband as a voice on the wireless spoke about men’s fashion and…
Giorgio de Chirico Gare Montparnasse
The other morning, the Director of MoMA from New York, Glenn D Lowry was on ABC Breakfast. He was knowledgable…
Xena madness
For sheer grotesquerie, a recent push for the feminisation of the Australian Army would be hard to beat. Former General…
Heart of darkness
Sometimes African rulers get so corrupt that Western aid donors go on strike. Take what Trump would call the shit-hole…
Pride stripped bare
Every now and again the clouds part, a shaft of light breaks through and something up ahead is illuminated. In…
Trump towers
In his 1977 book The Age of Uncertainty, the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith depicted the great leaders of history…
Diary
The great moment arrives: my audience with The Queen. Foreign ambassadors are received by Her Majesty with elaborate ceremony, which…
Brown study
The monstrous rape and murder of Eurydice Dixon has cast a pall over Melbourne and it is only right and…
Theatre of the absurd
The controversial University of Melbourne dance performance, Where We Stand, is an insight into the kind of divided society we…
Nobel laureates manqués
Calls for a Nobel Peace Prize for Donald Trump reminded me that if anyone should be a Nobel Laureate, it…
Closing down sale
When an historic Melbourne church went up in flames three years ago, the actress Rachel Griffiths, who’d made her First…
