Why are children in Guernsey extolling Islam to their parents?
A school exercise has the parents up in arms
What was this bed-blocker doing on my ward?
My NHS experience, with a life-threatening problem, was an encouraging one – apart from the other patients
The City says it’s for staying in but I wonder what the big beasts think
Also in Any Other Business: Boris and the pound; Standard Chartered; China’s incompetent stock-market regulators
The Tory dogfight
The Brexit campaign has been greatly bolstered by the support of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove
Out on the farm
Yes, they depend on EU subsidies. But the results of leaving the CAP could be surprising
A foolish proposal
The idea that women must wait for 29 February implies that we’re not allowed to propose whenever we want
The trouble with the Kurds
Our favourite allies in Iraq and Syria have problems and divisions of their own
‘Existentialism? I don’t know what it is’
Sarah Bakewell reminds us how popular — and de rigueur — the philosophy once was, even though very few people understood it
Waspish traditionalist
Randolph Schwabe was considered an old-fashioned draughtsman even in the 1930s, so his current revival — in London and Chichester — is doubly surprising
Ruling the digital waves
Tom Lean’s Electronic Dreams reminds us how Britain once led the field in computer science, producing systems more revolutionary than the Apple Mac
Vile deeds and voyeurism
The lure of evil — even for the well-intentioned — is the subject of this Hitchcockian nove
All things to all men
And what do they signify? Almost anything, it turns out from Christopher Oldstone-Moore’s revealing study — except a passing fashion
Muses, nurses and punch-bags
Jeffrey Meyers includes among the poet’s ‘loves’ not only his many wives and mistresses but his colleagues, students, protégés, mentors and mother
In the wrong club
The most vocal of the Marx Brothers disliked his comic persona and preferred reading, writing and the company of poets to showbiz
Two men in a boat
Ian McGuire tells a thrilling story of dirty tricks and deadly rivalry on a Victorian whaling vessel bound for the Arctic
An electrifying politician
George Goodwin focuses on Franklin’s London years, which saw the brilliant polymath’s career abruptly ended by the American War of Independence
Doomed youth
Graeme Thomson’s account of the musician’s all-too-short life spent struggling against the odds packs a real emotional punch
Life in a glass house
Is this hero paranoid, or is someone really monitoring his every move, as he suspects?
The Mann who knew everyone
He may have been an exacting father, but Frederic Spotts is too hard on him in this biography of his troubled, hectic, drug-addicted son
War on Mount Olympus
Tim Whitmarsh sets out to show that atheism was quite normal in classical Greece. But it’s a more slippery notion than he realises
One man’s war through 45 objects
A former British Army captain’s autobiographical novel uses inanimate objects to describe the horrors of war — but it’s not a successful, or even original, device
