Libs’ bad joke
The Liberal factional powerbroker-lobbyists disaster in NSW now belongs to Malcolm Turnbull. Failure to prevent the exercise of lobbyist power…
Seeing red
Early on in his excellent and protean biography of a colour, Spike Bucklow quotes Goethe, writing in 1809: Every rope…
Super human
‘We think we’re in charge of this stuff but we’re not,’ said Quincy Jones, the composer, arranger, jazz trumpeter, musical…
An age-old problem
With a title like A Beautiful Young Wife, this is of course about the decline of an older husband. Professor…
Adams apple
Grandmaster Michael Adams turned in a superlative performance earlier this month to win the British Championship for the fifth time.…
Part sermon, part crossword puzzle
The Schooldays of Jesus is not, as it happens, about the schooldays of Jesus. It is the Man Booker-nominated sequel…
Act of contrition
In Competition No. 2961 you were invited to submit limericks that might have been written by Boris Johnson in an…
Playing for high stakes
Now that even candidates for President of the United States can rise up from the undead dregs of reality television,…
to 2271: I’m not here or there
All but one of the unclued lights can be preceded by DOCTOR (or in one case DOC). The title also…
Agents of enterprise
A teenager in the second decade of the Cold War, my father was taught to play snooker by a KGB…
Battle for Britain
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The original and the copyist
Architecture is sometimes described as the second oldest profession, but often — in both theory and practice — it competes…
Dear Mary
Q. My partner and I have been living together for 26 years, but now that he’s asked me to marry…
Ways out of recovery
Perhaps because so many of them are former drunks and junkies, ‘addiction experts’ are touchy people. Often they don’t like…
Chrononhotonthologos
When I ran out of space last week, I was about to mention the way in which some people relish…
The age of accusation
Mark Lawson’s latest novel, set in Britain in the recent past, presents us with a nation in the grip of…
Diary
Throughout our holiday, reports from Rio rippled in — last thing at night, first thing in the morning — a…
To zyxst and back again
What the Great Eastern was to Brunel, the New English Dictionary was to James Murray (1837–1915) — an unequalled task…
High life
An item in an American newspaper had me thinking of my father all last week. Old dad died 27 years…
Out – and not proud
‘Many people are mourning,’ said Sam West on a BBC panel show discussing the response of the arts world to…
Low life
I took the only spare chair on the terrace of the Modern bar, one of four bars on this Provençal…
1976 and all that
Forty years ago, I spent 14 hours in a large field near the A1 in Hertfordshire. I had just taken…
Young at heart
The second half of the Bolshoi tour brought much fresher fare than the first: following the ubiquitous warhorses Don Quixote…
Long life
In the four months since I had a brain haemorrhage I have had several tests to find out how my…
