Dumbing down the house
Osterley Park on the western fringes of London is a rare survival. A Robert Adam house, with splendid Adam interiors,…
Calendar clash
On a Friday evening in May 2018 I am going to see the Broadway show Hamilton. We had to book…
Poison, spies and lies
Washington DC Roger Stone — political consultant, agent provocateur, friend and confidant of Donald Trump — arrives for lunch…
How to make drugs boring
Bill Blair, the former police chief of Toronto, slides into his restaurant chair and twinkles at the waitress. He’s 6ft…
Sydney Notebook
The other day, I went to a boozy barbecue near Sydney’s northern beaches. The guests were all political mates of…
The Suffolk-Essex border
You’ve already seen a picture of the Essex-Suffolk border. Assuming you’ve seen Constable’s ‘The Haywain’, that is: the Stour (the…
The plot against the Pope
On the first Saturday in February, the people of Rome awoke to find the city covered in peculiar posters depicting…
Mutkin’s masterpiece
This Saturday, 11 March, the annual Oxford v Cambridge Varsity match is being hosted by The Royal Automobile Club Pall…
no. 447
Black to play. This position is from Kozera-Wang, Varsity Match 2016. White has powerful threats and Black has only one…
Mark making
In Competition No. 2988 you were invited to compose a poem making the case for a national commemoration day for…
2300: The law
Each of ten clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter.…
to 2297: Thoroughly
Corrections of misprints in clues give INSIDE OUT. Thematic entries at 2, 15A, 25, 30 and 39 are defined by…
Dear Mary
Q. Most of my friends have small children and being mostly media types in west London, have given them silly…
A vintage that tastes of Old Possum
Eliot. After 50 years trying to make sense of his verse, and at the risk of admitting to rampant philistinism,…
Ambition deficit
Some Budgets are historic, most are boring and a small number can be remembered as a disaster. After just a few months, Philip…
High life
A lousy fortnight if ever there was one. Two great friends, Lord Belhaven and Stenton and Aleko Goulandris, had their…
Low life
In Spain, I stayed in youth hostels in Barcelona, Alicante, Almeria and Seville. But that first hostel in Barcelona, where…
Kippah
What, asks the columnist Philologus in the online magazine Mosaic, is the difference between a kippah and a yarmulke? I’m…
Victory in sight for the free schools revolution
I’m not surprised the Chancellor allocated more money for the free schools policy in the Budget. It’s not an exaggeration…
Technology and the winner-takes-all effect
I was exchanging emails with someone the other day and signed off with the sentence ‘let me know when you…
Wild life
Laikipia On Tristan Voorspuy’s hell-for-leather riding safaris across Kenya’s savannah, he cracked a bullwhip at predators that tried to eat…
Enemies of the people
Hardly a week goes by without someone applauding Thomas Carlyle’s objection to democracy: ‘I do not believe in the collective…
Barometer
Naming the weather Former BBC weatherman Bill Giles has said he’s fed up with storms being named. — The practice…
