Answering back
In Competition No. 2991 you were invited to submit ‘The Rime of the Wedding Guest’. There were, naturally, lots…
2304: Hexagon
The same 26 appears six times in 1D. Remaining unclued lights exemplify its different meanings. The 26 will appear diagonally…
to 2301: Age of extremes
Unclued lights (in red) are the characteristics of ‘the period’, from the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities.…
Dear Mary
A friend of a friend hosted an engagement party in a London hotel. Invitations had gone out six weeks beforehand,…
A toast to unsung heroes
We were talking about war, the desert and God. In the early Seventies, one of our number, Christopher James, had…
Perilous times
Helen Dunmore’s new novel concerns lives, consequential in their day, that pass away into utter oblivion. Appropriately, the ‘solitary and…
That’s entertainment
The name Maud Russell creeps almost apologetically into a few 20th-century diaries such as those of her friend Violet Bonham…
Bird thou never wert
The most appealing phoenix in literature is surely the eponymous bird from E. Nesbit’s 1904 classic, The Phoenix and the…
Understated eloquence
It is 50 years since the publication of Very Like a Whale, Ferdinand Mount’s first novel. ‘Mr Mount’s distinguishing feature…
A unique literary phenomenon
The Argentinian writer César Aira is a prodigy: at the age of 68 he has published, according to a ‘partial…
The lost Stradivarius
Min Kym is a violinist, but if you Google her name you won’t find sound-clips or concert reviews, touring schedules…
An untouchable star
This slight book comes with heavy baggage. In 2009, Rampling handed back a hefty advance for her contribution to a…
Fragments of the future
Science fiction is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, though the…
The pleasures of reading aloud
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Buzzing bees and chocolate trees
It is estimated that the world’s insects perform an annual pollination service for all humankind worth $215 billion. In return,…
Two small boys in the sea
An estimated 400,000 people drown annually worldwide, 50 per cent of them children. Roughly 150 drownings occur in the UK.…
High life
New York I’d gladly exchange waistlines with him if he’d teach me to cut a phrase the way he…
Inmates and Islamism
In response to the Westminster attack, a 100-strong new counter-extremism taskforce has been announced to deal with the terrorist threat…
War-war, not jaw-jaw
It’s often said that the Trump administration is ‘isolationist’. This is not true. In fact, we are now witnessing a…
My towering problem
Why don’t tall people get the same sympathy as short people? Everyone feels sorry for minnows, cutting them slack when…
Trump’s plan for Pyongyang
On several foreign policy issues, Donald Trump has mellowed since taking office. His administration still has concerns about the Iran…
In defence of Ken
We never loved each other, Ken Livingstone and I. We first clashed in public more than a decade ago, and…
Business/Robbery etc
How’s this for the ‘balance and objectivity’ that the United States Studies Centre claims to provide as an ‘objective and…
Battlelines drawn on free speech
With the Senate voting down the Coalition’s proposed reforms to section 18C, the battle lines for free speech have now…
Judging Turnbull
Recently, Malcolm Turnbull has from time to time tried to act like the centre-right leader of a centre-right government, which…
