US Diary
It was a somewhat surreal experience to be standing with my partner and two children in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square,…
New beginnings
In Competition No. 3008 you were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the…
to 2317:370
The answer to the subtraction sum in the title is 1947. So all the unclued lights are celebrities who celebrate…
Dear Mary
Q. My children are very lucky in that we have bought them all flats. However, they are now renting out…
Spirits from the vasty deep…
‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…
Towering extravagance
The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying…
Rules of behaviour
It’s the constant dilemma of the pop science author: how to write something flashy enough to grab readers, but solid…
Down – if not out – in Paris
Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who…
A cacophony of complaint
What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…
His own worst enemy
One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out…
The dark side of creativity
In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…
Black prince or white knight?
We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture…
Drowning in mud and blood
George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne…
… trailing strands in all directions
Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of…
Abbott’s mission
As Adam Smith once observed, in most nations there’s often a lot of ruin. His point was that it takes…
The game’s up. Or is it?
A state division of the Liberal Party will have a State Conference on 2-3 September 2017 to debate the introduction…
Woolf works
‘What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you,’ Virginia Woolf composed in…
Epiphanic
‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported…
Wild life
Kenya We are on the beach, where our home is full of dystopian stories. My daughter Eve is whizzing…
The right kind of dumbing down
Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of…
Healthy scepticism
As we pointed out last week, if the Liberals wish to win the next election they can do so easily.…
Letters
Bugs bite back Sir: Matthew Parris is quite right to say that we Leavers would prefer independence in reduced circumstances…
Australian notes
Sensible centre is for suckers I am going to point to the US, the UK and modern mainstream protestant…
Brown study
I am indebted to the public-spirited citizen who sent me the charter drawn up by Male Champions of Change and…
My beef with David Cameron
Insufficient attention has been paid to the history of naughty girls, who deployed allure to prosper in a male-dominated world.…
