Dear Mary: How can I persuade a friend to stop allowing her dog to lick her plate?
Q. My grandson has just failed his driving test for the fifth time and yet I know, from his chauffeuring…
Cheese and onion pasties: how to make a Greggs classic at home
‘That’s not a pasty!’ my husband declares loftily, eyeing up what most definitely is a veritable clutch of cheese and…
Should I be cancelled for being in the Epstein files?
I was planning to begin this column by saying how relieved I was to be mentioned in the latest Epstein…
What Catholics get wrong about assisted dying
The Catholic Church has always been remarkably relaxed about sin. It becomes distinctly jumpy, however, when it encounters any challenge…
How Romans would have known how to deal with Epstein
To look through Jeffrey Epstein’s curriculum vitae on Google is to be left goggling at how this revolting creature could have…
‘I want to stop the Antichrist’ – can Peter Thiel succeed?
Last December, we flew to Los Angeles to interview Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech tycoon and co-founder of PayPal. We…
The secrets of Putin’s shadow fleet
Of all the weapons in Vladimir Putin’s arsenal, the most strategically crucial has proved to be not hypersonic missiles but…
The inconvenient truth about polar bears
The BBC reported terrible news last week about polar bears: they are thriving. This is very annoying of them as…
Our armed forces are hollow – and our enemies know it
When you’re the chief of the defence staff, the head of the British armed forces, it’s never a good sign…
The role of ABBA in the Ajax fiasco
‘It’s all about ABBA,’ a military acquaintance whispered when I mentioned the scandal of the British Army’s order of 589…
I decluttered a 1990s time capsule – and this is what I learnt
After my grandmother died a few years ago, we couldn’t bring ourselves to get rid of most of her possessions.…
What Freud would say about your teddy bear
It is widely known that when a Duke of York is down, he is down, and the recent hit-piece in…
The doctor will patronise you now
How a profession speaks to its subjects is always of interest to a writer, sometimes perversely so. Over the past…
Letters: Let children drink
Chagos stupidity Sir: To British Establishment watchers, Michael Gove’s dissection of the dubious and devious machinations of Jonathan Powell, Richard…
Electrifying: Annie & the Caldwells, at Ronnie Scott’s, reviewed
Annie & the Caldwells are a long-running family gospel ensemble from West Point, Mississippi – father and sons playing guitar,…
Fascinating: The Fabulous Funeral Parlour reviewed
The Fabulous Funeral Parlour ended with possibly the least necessary caption in TV history: ‘Filmed in Liverpool’. Whenever I go…
Richard Jones’s Boris Godunov feels like a parody
Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is back at Covent Garden, and there are ninjas. This isn’t a spoiler. There hasn’t been a…
Marvellously conservative: Cable Street reviewed
Cable Street is a musical that premièred last year at the Southwark Playhouse and has now migrated to the Marylebone…
Gripping: Melania reviewed
The documentary Melania, which follows the first lady in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s 2025 presidential inauguration,…
