Letters
IQ and social mobility Sir: It seems not to have occurred to our leaders that ability is not evenly distributed…
Herodotus on 111
The NHS 111 line, designed to deal with problems that do not count as emergencies, is in financial and organisational…
Barometer
Art by the seaside The Kent seaside resort of Herne Bay staged the parade of a urinal through the town…
Portrait of the week
Home Barclays decided to issue £5.8 billion in shares to meet capital reserve requirements from the Bank of England. Lord…
This cant about protecting the kiddies is really about protecting the coalition
I have tried very hard to become an afficianado of pornography, seeing as it is by far the most popular…
Do women really watch as much porn as men?
You may be aware that David Cameron — as part of a secret, Lynton Crosby-inspired operation codenamed Suck Up Shamelessly…
Sorry, but internet trolling will be with us forever
This is not to be a column about Twitter. Can’t abide columns about Twitter. I’ve written a few, I know,…
Welby is right to attack Wonga but wrong to push credit unions as a better answer
I’ve been in the pulpit again, this time to salute the centenary of the death of Charles Norris Gray, a…
Boris vs Theresa
The Mayor of London and the Home Secretary are squaring up for the next Tory leadership battle
The secret fertility service
The strange tale of how 500 women were helped to conceive after the first world war
The last male space
It’s a place for relaxed, civilised conversation (and a cheap haircut, of course)
Tales of the Wild East
The brutality and folly of Russia’s bid to conquer America has the makings of grand tragicomedy says Sam Leith
When every captain was a Nelson
‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody…
The great American nightmare
Colonel Eli McCullough, formerly known as Tiehteti, is a living legend. The first male child born in the Republic of…
They weren’t all shooting up or shooting each other
Rift Valley, Kenya The other day when I told the headmaster of a top British public school that I came…
The stoic approach
A friend of mine who works for the NHS has been told recently by a superior that his ‘attention to…
Men of mystery
People, they say, want different things from a book over the summer than they do the rest of the year.…
Inspiration from the past
Pastoral elegy is not what you expect to find in a collection of short stories, but then Ali Smith is…
On a wing and a prayer
‘A world without birds would lay waste the human heart,’ writes Mark Cocker. Following his Birds Britannica and prize-winning Crow…
