2309: Complicated
Corrections of misprints in clues give TANGLED UP IN BLUE, the title of a song by Bob Dylan. Answers to…
Dear Mary
Q. I am a member of a well-known country house opera society, and I organise annual trips to performances for…
Rosé-tinted glasses
It was a typical bank holiday. Usual English weather: glorious, until you leave home without a brolly. Then fickleness supervenes…
Lessons and games
‘Kokkinakis banged your girlfriend. Sorry to tell you that, mate,’ the Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios remarked to his opponent…
Every horror imaginable
The group of kidnapped women were terrified. They had been brought back to the camp as booty and were being…
Towering tree of God
In his biography of Gaudí, published in 2001, Gijs van Hensbergen opined that ‘we should never try to finish the…
Brava Bella
I like Bella Pollen for her open-mindedness, self-deprecation and verve. Given her early success as a fashion designer — top…
Too much of everything
Arundhati Roy has published only one previous novel, but that one, The God of Small Things, won the Booker Prize.…
A cursed house
Beyond the patricide and even the incest, the horror of the Oedipus myth lies in its insistence that our fates…
Pirates and puritans
In The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, Sue Townsend’s hapless teenage diarist, reeling from the news that Argentina has just…
Immaculate conceptions
Some 30 summers ago we were staying at a famously beautiful villa outside Turin; our hostess was — indeed is…
The gull’s way
In 1978, Adam Nicolson received three Hebridean islands as a 21st birthday present from his father, Nigel. The Shiants, each…
High life
I feel like an obituary writer, what with Nick Scott, Roger Moore, Alistair Horne — all great buddies — and…
Filling Triggs’ shoes
The Human Rights Commission’s selective agenda does not include the protection of fundamental human rights like freedom of speech. For…
Gender quotas, blue collars and male suicide
Let me tell you about a couple of patients who illustrate how feminism can contribute to both domestic violence and…
Death penalty for wannabe martyrs
Sooner or later some deranged Islamic fundamentalist is going to kill a lot of Australians for the greater glory of…
Islands in the stream
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr said ‘I would not give a fig for simplicity before complexity, but for simplicity after complexity…
Abortion fantasies
Three weeks ago, Parliament voted decisively to reject a bill that would have decriminalised abortion. Members of the New South…
Business/Robbery etc
Guilty. It’s not just the political class wrecking Australia’s economic future. Beside them in the dock are the overpaid corporate…
Aux bien pensants
At war Australia, along with all of the West, is at war. The enemy is Islamic terrorism. What should we…
Low life
My latest bed partner is a seven-year-old lad. That first night we slept together in my double bed, I hardly…
Reference
When Dickens wanted to buy a house in 1837, he wrote to Richard Bentley, who had started the magazine in…
Real life
‘You’re probably excited about your new service and keen to start using it as soon as you can,’ said the…
Race, gender and a terrifying witch hunt
A leading article appeared in Nature last week in defence of intelligence research. It lamented the fact that it is…
