Top of the Pops with silk tights
Here are three roles all actors love to play. The drunk (no need to learn your lines), the dementia victim…
A pint of Landlord
Down a lane in Keighley, in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, they brew the greatest ale in the world.…
Yes, he Khan
Giselle endures in the collective imagination as a charming, sorrowful, supernatural love story. Premièred in Paris in 1841, this keystone…
Thoroughly bewitching
Angela Carter was a seminal, a watershed novelist: perhaps one of the last generation of novelists to change both the…
Wrong side of the tracks
You will surely have seen the posters for The Girl on the Train with Emily Blunt staring from a train…
A puzzling phenomenon
Everyone has played it, or one of its manifold variations and rip-offs. Blocks of different shapes fall from the sky;…
Low life
The first and only time I went to a meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous, this chap stood up and gave…
Over hill and dale
When it comes to speaking of foreign affairs, Rory Stewart is one of the few MPs who does not peddle…
Long life
In olden days, before the internet arrived, shopping was quite simple. You’d go into a shop and buy something, and…
Derring-do in the desert
The SAS was the first unit to be granted regimental status for generations. Its chief aim was to damage the…
The magic of bookshops
It is not uncommon for writers to be obsessed by bookshops. Some even find their writing feet through loving a…
no. 429
White to play. This is from Tal-Botvinnik, World Championship (Game 12), Moscow 1961. Tal’s next move did not force an…
Bolsheviks on board
Full allowance must be made for the desperate tasks to which the German war leaders were already committed… Nevertheless it…
2281: Fail
Each of eleven clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter;…
A good read… but I don’t buy the plot
I’m writing this from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where the mood is buoyant, to put it mildly. Everyone…
More sinned against than sinning
The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in…
Let there be light, and at better times of day
We already drive on the left, give road distances in miles and drink pints. So one good feature of Brexit…
The spell of the pharaohs
Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on the gift of the Nile,…
Eat, drink and be worried
We were surpassing Sydney Smith. His idea of heaven was pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Our…
Jolly good fellows
‘Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was one of the most admired and influential American writers of the last half century,’ states the…
Australian letters
Pollies pryorities Sir: If only’ the changes to the upper houses of Parliament recommended by Noreen Pryor could be enacted,…
Smoke and mirrors
Nell Zink’s route to publication became something of a story in itself: one that involved an email exchange about birds…
Stormy Weatherill
State governments are sheltered workshops for mediocre politicians rarely good enough to make it in the Canberra big league. They…
Nazis and narcotics
Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis, for compared to what our little group got up to in the…
Diary
I arrive at Melbourne airport for my midnight flight with an unfortunately timed cold. My lack of sleep after Canberra’s…
