Bad sex award
In Competition No. 2924 you were invited to submit a ‘love scene’ from a novel that dampens rather than boosts…
All at sea
Ignore this Royal Opera House world premiere. Save your money. And invest it instead in a lively new work, Biedermann and the Arsonists, at the Lilian Baylis Studio
The atheist delusion
When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow — the novel that no one dared publish — looks set to become a comic classic
2238: Old issues
The title suggests a pair of unclued lights which identify the common feature of the others. Solvers must shade the…
The man who wouldn’t be king
Plus: the tragic tale of Jim Ellis, the wannabe crooner who was ensnared in a media construct more exploitative than any conjured up by Simon Cowell
In the grip of yellow fever
Sax Rohmer’s lurid novels thrilled Edwardian Britain with their opium dens, thugees and moustachioed super-villain
French connection
Plus: the experiences of three generations of immigrant women. How settled do they feel?
To 2235: Vile stuff
The quotation was ‘IS THIS A [DAGGER] WHICH I SEE BEFORE ME’ (1/44) (Macbeth).18, 22, 2, 27, 29 and 30D…
Are we looking at the end of liberal democracy?
Enlightenment values have proved to be thin gruel next to the heady cocktail of anti-western ideology and a brutally literal interpretation of the Quran
Does HS2 pass the Butterfield test?
Butterfield’s Law: for something to be called truly innovative, it must markedly change human behaviour
Guinness and oysters — or beef and Haut-Brion — in deepest Ireland
The puritanical strain of their Catholicism has helped the Irish endure austery for far longer than the UK
‘Clean eating’ is a great word of the year… for 1906
A century ago this currently modish phrase had an entirely different meaning
New Neighbour
The trellis between her garden and her new neighbour’s garden is heavy with passion flower, honeysuckle and roses, so that…
What to do?
First, let’s list the obscenities, of which there have been so many (not including, of course, the Parisian atrocities themselves).…
Australian notes
I have a modest proposal to help combat the appeal to ordinary or ‘moderate’ Muslims, especially the young, of what…
Paris diary
Earlier in the week I’d been in London, Oxford, Dublin and Brussels for a series of meetings and speaking commitments.…
Republican notes
Our best defence against jihadism? Abbott Until those acts of appallingly primitive barbarism in Paris, the events surrounding Prince Charles’…
United we fall
In the wake of Paris, the United Nation’s corrupt moralising is even more disgusting than normal
Conservatives, maintain your rage
Should Australian conservative Liberals simply lie back and think of Wentworth?
Culture buff
The first performance of King Lear took place in 1606 barely three years after James IV of Scotland had inherited…
