Dear Mary
Q. I have a very good cleaner who comes once a week. She is far more efficient than anyone I’ve…
When will we ever learn?
In 2012, sugar became more dangerous than gunpowder. According to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, of the 56 million people…
A very British bildung
Over the long weekend I read a couple of bildungs-romans; one a revisit after many years, the other a recent…
On the trail of a lost masterpiece
On 27 May 1939, the German liner St Louis docked in Havana with 937 passengers on board: all but a…
Cinderella in China
She was a foundling in her own family, shunted to adoptive parents for two years, then to the edge of…
Climb trees and grow a beard
A few years after Walt Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass (it didn’t do well), he…
Suspension of disbelief
The history of modern medicine is a roll call of brilliant minds making breakthrough discoveries. We rarely hear about the…
In a dark forest
In his mid-forties Will Ashon realised he was adrift and confused, confronted by the situation Dante described in the Divine…
Burning issues
Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is…
Appointment with death
It’s reassuring that of Ed Docx’s three admirably eclectic, though sometimes uneven, previous novels, Let Go My Hand most resembles…
The fearful forties
In an early chapter of All Grown Up, the narrator Andrea says to her therapist: ‘Why is being single the…
A husband to die for
What will we do when there are no longer caches of letters to piece together and decipher; only vague memories…
High life
I’m sitting in my office and the place is still. The rest of the house is dark. Everyone’s out and…
German attacks on Israel
It might be thought that Germany would still feel a bit… er… sensitive in its dealing with Jews. Indeed, the…
Marine or Macron?
If the voters obey the elites and elect Emmanuel Macron, the Fifth Republic may well be doomed, which could have…
Restoring the Romanovs
Our exclusive interview with Alexander Zakatov, Head of the Chancellery of the Russian Imperial House
Laughing gas
The latest lunatic government intervention into Australian energy markets conjures up the old lady who swallowed a fly. In 2001,…
Dance of the budget veils
Conventional wisdom holds that an elected government’s first budget should be its bravest. Albeit with a micro-majority, Malcolm Turnbull is…
Time to scrap the rebates
Malcolm Turnbull almost lost an election because he had no health policy. Bill Shorten and Labor’s blatant, fabricated ‘Mediscare’, claiming…
Business/Robbery etc
The Liberals’ broad church? In NSW it’s getting thinner on a diet of expulsions and desertions. Remove the nave, the…
Low life
‘Emmanuel Macron est le plus grand con du monde,’ said the elderly gent taking the vacant seat on my right…
Compliance
Ralph Bathurst was accused shortly after his death in 1704 of being ‘suspected of Hypocrisy and of mean Complyance’. I…
Real life
A gentleman on Twitter ‘writes’ to say I’m boring him with my house move. ‘Snooze-fest’, says this chap, and he…
It’s time you made some enemies, George
Dear George Osborne, I thought it worth passing along some advice about your new job. I’ve never edited a news-paper,…
