On the way out
In Competition No. 3036 you were invited to provide a resignation letter in the style of a well-known author. I…
2347: Capital letters
Each of the eight unclued lights is a series of letters in alphabetical order which can be formed into eight…
to 2344: I’m away
The unclued lights can be preceded by or followed by the unclued word DOCTOR, which explains why I (Doc) am…
My children have turned my weight loss into the Stanford prison experiment
I’ve become obsessed with my BMI. For those of you who don’t know, it stands for body mass index and…
Hate the Winter Olympics? Here’s why you’re wrong
Despite the best efforts of this column (and the BBC), too many Brits regard the Winter Olympics with the same…
Dear Mary: how can we dissuade friends from visiting when one of us is ill?
Q. Obviously one is delighted to have visits from close friends and family when one’s spouse is ailing, but how…
A Soho steak house that used to be a pornographic cinema: Sophie’s reviewed
Sophie’s lives in an old pornographic cinema at the south end of Great Windmill Street, Soho. It is opposite McDonald’s…
From Jeeves to Johnson: language and literary references in Boris’s speech
In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, Bertie is moved to reward his inestimable valet for solving the unsolvable. Before requesting the…
Australian letters
Love is love Sir: What total hypocrisy: the words attacking Barnaby Joyce from the same people who argued we must…
Well out of it
Of all the absurd things that have been said about Brexit, Chris Patten’s comment in his Spectator Australia interview with…
Top three lefty unis
From the sandstones to the concrete monstrosities, Australia’s university students are returning to lecture halls and classrooms in coming weeks.…
Brown study
Malcolm Turnbull is wrong about the effect of his proposed new morals code to stop ministers from philandering in the…
Business/Robbery etc
The Turnbull government’s survival depends on a far more serious internal battle than whether Barnaby should keep his fly done…
Bye bye Nats?
Some could use the Barnaby Joyce Affair as an opportunity to kick the National party while it’s down… so let’s…
Minding the gap
Once again the start of the federal parliamentary year has been marked by what has become an annual ritual. The…
What is the point of Cory Bernardi?
Let me be honest. I don’t really see the point of Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives (‘AC’) party as presently configured.…
Paying for steel jobs
Indian billionaire Sanjeev Gupta is now in the same category as American entrepreneur Elon Musk in that any absurd idea…
Australian diary
For some, it’s spiders or public speaking. For others, it’s being un-friended on Facebook or Jar Jar Binks returning to…
Rinat Shaham (Carmen) & Marcelo Puente (Don José)
There was an intriguing surprise at a fine performance of Carmen last week; the surtitles carrying the translation of the…
Aux bien pensants
Proscribe parallelism not promiscuity By proscribing sexual relations with ministerial staff and through his public moral condemnation of Nationals leader…
Bucking Barnaby
Something doesn’t quite add up. On the one hand, the Prime Minister’s spouse, Lucy Turnbull, proudly announces via a soft…
Their ABC: at it again
And here we were in the reality-based community thinking it would be hard for even the ABC to trump last…
In defence of Tasmania
It feels a bit odd that someone like me, a native-born Canadian who has lived in Queensland for the last…
Barnaby’s concrete-assisted trolley ride crashes to an end
“Perhaps the biggest scandal in Australia political history? Made only by the fact it was managed like a shopping trolley…
