Hell is a speed awareness course
The builder boyfriend sat nervously in front of my laptop as I logged him in to do his speed awareness…
The racing victory I’ve enjoyed the most
Allegedly the most effective rain dance in the world is that performed by Native American Hopi Indians. The biennial 16-day…
Nunc est bidendum – to Horace, the lusty rebel
Peter Stothard’s portrait of an ambitious young Lothario running wild and refusing to knuckle down is certainly not the Horace we know from Latin lessons
An ill wind: Poppyland, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed
Norfolk life looks quietly bleak in these carefully worked short stories of broken homes, precarious employment, dwindling expectations and torpor
With many despairing academics packing it in, who will solve the problem of the universities?
Something is seriously amiss when such a courageous and independent-minded professor as Matt Goodwin feels he no longer belongs in the system
No place is safe: The Brittle Age, by Donatella di Pietrantonio, reviewed
When her daughter, a student in Milan, is left traumatised after being mugged, Lucia is reminded of her own violent introduction to adulthood at a similar ‘brittle age’
Remembering Hiroshima 80 years on
Iain MacGregor’s impeccably researched account of the first use of nuclear weapons in war is a timely reminder of the horrors they unleash on the world
Everyone who was anyone in Russia was spied on – including Stalin
In 1972,Vasili Mitrokhin oversaw the transfer of thousands of documents in the KGB archives and secretly noted the atrocities they revealed - though Stalin’s file was mysteriously empty
What Mark Twain owed to Charles Dickens
It wasn’t just Dickens’s stage performances and publishing ventures that fascinated Twain, but the witty, journalistic style, which he mimicked to great effect in early travel books
Charles Darwin’s contribution to Patagonia’s grim history
Characterising native tribes as ‘naked, painted, shivering, hideous savages’ proved no less calamitous for their survival as Argentina’s efforts to exterminate them, says Matthew Carr
The strange futility of the Musk-Trump feud
The Trump-Musk spat is not the sign of a new split between oligarchs and populists, as some have claimed –…
Why the Kerch bridge must fall
Vladimir Putin has hit back against Ukraine’s ‘Spiderweb’ operation, which recently destroyed or damaged at least two dozen Russian bombers.…
After Elon Musk, America is never going to be the same
Only certain days qualify as the greatest days in American history: July 4, 1776 will always lead the way, as…
