2315: Trunk call
Seven unclued entries are all examples of the other. Elsewhere, ignore an accent. Across 11 Ginger wine and rose…
to 2312: Bandleader
The thematic BEATLES ALBUM (38 32) is SERGEANT PEPPER (1A 6A). 1A defines 17, and can be divided into words…
Dear Mary
Q. I import a range of very high-quality food products from Europe into the UK. They are regarded as the…
Damage limitation
One of the most pitiful sights in conflict areas is the local prosthetics store, with its rows of artificial limbs,…
Verse and worse
Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed…
The disgrace of the British left
Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years…
Blood and bling
There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of…
The evil that men do
Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as…
Do we give a hoot?
‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between…
She-devils on horseback
Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel…
Another gone girl
Adam Thorpe’s latest novel, Missing Fay, examines the lives of a disparate group of people in Lincolnshire, all touched in…
Borne back ceaselessly into the past
‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936.…
Patience on a monument
As a food writer Patience Gray (1917–2005) merits shelf-space with M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Fleeing from the…
The greatest survival story
This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock…
A policeman’s lot
Described by the publisher as a ‘moving and personal account of what it is to be a police officer today’,…
A barren prospect
In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife,…
Not my bag
Hip Chips is a specialist crisp restaurant in Old Compton Street, Soho; no, it is stupider than that. It is…
High life
A famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel about a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes: ‘If…
True Islam
Each new Islamic terrorist atrocity is denounced by western leaders such as our Prime Minister as a ‘twisted’ or ‘perverted’…
Men of violence
Almost every other Aboriginal woman I know has been subject to family violence. It is in fact rare for an…
Reinventing energy policy
While the Liberal party tears itself apart over whether a Clean Energy Target as proposed by the Finkel report delivered…
Thou shalt not steal the truth
On 11 May 2017, under the auspices of Dialogue4Peace, I, together with Egyptian Copt, Nadia Ghali, were the main speakers…
Low life
‘Yours?’ I said to the woman watching the mechanic poring over the latest-shape Renault Mégane for faults. (I was waiting…
Narrative
Laura Kuenssberg was right. Even my husband agreed, and he often throws soiled beermats from an unknown source (which he…
