Knight outriders
A good rule of thumb is to avoid sending off knights to excursions at the edge of the board, where…
no. 493
White to play. This position is from Capablanca-Fonaroff, New York 1918. Once again there is a knight on h6. What…
That lovin’ feeling
In Competition No. 3035 you were invited to provide a poem entitled ‘The Love Song of [insert name of a…
2346: The name of the game
The unclued entries (two hyphened) are all synonyms. Each of five clues contains a word that must be removed to…
to 2343: Rats!
The perimeter quote is by Nietzsche (taking the 1 in the top left corner as the first word). Other unclued lights…
Peter Rabbit ‘allergy bullying’? I’m allergic to all this constant outrage
I’m often surprised by what people are offended by. Like the makers of Peter Rabbit, the new animated feature from…
Reducing activities to their core misses the point
There may be a very simple evolutionary reason why water does not really taste of anything, as I learned from…
Dear Mary: How can we get our star friend along to dinner when he’s so busy?
Q. We want to invite a rather exceptional friend to dinner. He lives nearby but he has a top job…
I’m grateful for my grateful drinking friend
The phone rang. ‘You are the last person in the world I should be talking to’, proclaimed an old friend…
‘Sorted’ has always had connotations of menace
My heart leapt up on Newport station, an unusual place for that to happen, when I heard a recorded announcement:…
Why we shouldn’t try the jihadi ‘Beatles’ in Britain
The success of the military campaign against Isis in Syria and Iraq has left behind a diplomatic and legal problem:…
Darwin’s puppets
When I was young, like many teenagers, I considered science dull. At a Passover dinner one year, I declared this…
Neo-Marxist notes
I can best explain my temporary absence from these pages by saying that I agreed to write a ‘short’ book…
Dietary notes
Flopsy, mopsy, cottontail & peter Remember Beatrix Potter’s little rabbits that live in constant fear of Farmer Brown? Well they…
Australian diary
I returned to Parliament a week early for hearings of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. The committee…
Paula and Helen Thomson in Top Girls
Caryl Churchill is getting on a bit; I know because she was born just two days after me. She is…
When will they ever learn?
One January morning in 1800, a mysterious being emerged from the woods near Aveyron in France. The size of a…
Is time running out for Western civilisation?
‘What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms yet, but I think I can recognise…
Eyeballing DFAT
The problem with our foreign affairs bureaucracy isn’t just the consistent political correctness and suspicion of the Coalition. Much time…
Harvey Weinstein Syndrome
As with most popular movements, what starts from good intentions frequently spirals out of control – or beyond what its…
The Fighting Kangaroo
Jim Eames, an established and respected aviation writer, whose previous credits include The Flying Kangaroo, a history of Qantas, has…
Autocues for the clueless
Was anyone really surprised when the factional warlords and powerbrokers in the key NSW division of the Liberal party so…
Exorcising Malcolm
Those close to the Prime Minister talk of ‘good Malcolm’ versus ‘bad Malcolm’ – the two sides to Mr Turnbull’s…
Yassmin’s Islamic amnesia
Like so many Australians, I have come to the conclusion that Yassmin Abdel-Magied is maybe not quite in touch with…
