Beware taking up running in your fifties
Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the…
Portrait of the week: War in the Middle East, drought in Yorkshire and a knighthood for Beckham
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, announced a full national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs (which he had previously…
The unvarnished truth about rape gangs
Some crimes are so horrific that our instinct is to look away. And there can be few as appalling as…
The rose-tinted view of female friendship shatters
Are women’s relationships with each other today more brittle and less supportive than in the past?
My modest proposal
It’s surely time we dropped our cynicism and got behind the government’s National Abortion Drive, another noble attempt to kickstart…
The politics of horror
Everyone forgets the actual opening scene of 28 Days Later, even though it’s deeply relatable, in that it features a…
Toppling Iran’s Supreme Leader could be a mistake
Are we already seeing an ominous mission creep in Israel’s blistering attack on Iran? First, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s air…
Mark Carney, the mischief-making pin-up
Well, would you look at Mark Carney. Just three months ago I described the incoming prime minister of Canada and…
Who’s pushing Trump to be an Iran hawk?
‘This never would have happened if I had been president,’ says Donald Trump, whenever the international news goes from bad…
No. 855
White to play. Grischuk-Firouzja, World Blitz Team Championship, London 2025. A bishop up, Firouzja seems to have everything covered. Which…
What else could Israel do?
Over the past few days British readers have been able to enjoy a number of hot takes on the situation…
Why must B&B guests give us advice?
‘You could mow all this lawn here and it would look a treat,’ said the arborist, returning from a stroll…
Suburbanites vs the countryside
‘Same old boring Sunday morning, old men out, washing their cars.’ So begins the punk anthem ‘The Sound of the…
The artistic benefits of not being publicly subsidised
Paralysed rather than empowered by the heavy hand of Big Brother Arts Council, the major subsidised dance companies are running…
Heaven is Angel Delight
I once heard an American complain that, being married to an Englishwoman, he was regularly baffled by the contents of…
My campaign to bring back real life
A new book by an American writer, Christine Rosen, details the way in which we are losing touch with the…
Superb: Stereophonic, at Duke of York’s Theatre, reviewed
Stereophonic is a slow-burning drama set in an American recording studio in 1976. A collection of hugely successful musicians, loosely…
What Seneca would have made of the assisted dying bill
Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill has generated much talk about the ethics of suicide. As far as the ancients were…
Haunted by my great-grandfather’s second wife – by Alice Mah
An academic specialising in ecology, Mah traces her constant anxiety about the world to a ghostly Chinese forebear
The right rape gang inquiry
Another inquiry into child sexual abuse, another minister insisting that this time it will be different. Yvette Cooper promises arrests,…
The cheering fantasies of Oliver Messel
Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic.…
Style, wit and pace: Netflix’s Dept. Q reviewed
Can you imagine how dull a TV detective series set in a realistic Scottish police station would be? Inspector Salma…
