Children have the Proms. Grown-ups head to Salzburg. Snob summer
Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a…
Free speech stops riots
With depressing predictability, the riots have led to calls for more censorship. Historically, it was the authoritarian right who blamed…
Dear Mary: how do I set up two young people?
Q. I have invited some younger friends to stay with me at a family house in Spain. Among the party…
This Olympics belongs to the female athletes
You knew it was going to be a superb Olympics from the moment Celine Dion belted out an Edith Piaf…
What is ‘thuggery’?
The word that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, chose to describe the action of rioters was more interesting than…
The Greek guide to swearing an oath
A lawyer who wished to serve on a jury but was no Christian was given permission to swear his oath…
Being mugged changes you forever
Being mugged changes you forever. My encounter with highwaymen occurred three decades ago in a south London street, in the…
Welcome back to London City Ballet – but can they please change their name?
There’s sound thinking behind this summer’s resuscitation of London City Ballet – a medium-scale touring company popular in the 1980s…
Spectator Competition: To the letter
In Competition 3361 you were invited to submit a passage or poem whose meaning was affected by some missing, substituted…
Why Britain riots
Riotous summers seem to occur in Britain with about the same frequency as sunny ones: roughly every decade. Sometimes it’s…
British Championships
The stench of burning rubber hung in the air as I trudged back to my hotel in Hull city centre last…
‘Yobbos come in all sorts of colours’: on the ground in Rotherham
The Holiday Inn Express in Manvers, Rotherham, is opposite an RSPB nature reserve. For months, its 130 rooms have been…
Yorkshire curd tart: a well-kept, delicious secret
There are many old dishes in the UK that are hyper-regional, whose reach has never extended beyond geographical boundaries but…
Can anything stop a full-scale conflict in the Middle East?
The fact that the Middle East stands on the brink of a catastrophic war can be explained by a scene…
The glory of Glorious Goodwood
You wouldn’t want to have been collecting the empties from Robins Farm, Chiddingfold, last week. There is no more sociable…
How students toppled Bangladesh’s despot
Dhaka On Monday, Bangladesh’s long-serving prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country by helicopter to India. Parliament was…
Bridge | 10 August 2024
What can you say about the Rimstedt brothers that hasn’t already been said? They returned from the American Nationals in…
The unfashionable truth about the riots
As the days slip by, the likelihood that anything will be learned from the recent rioting looks ever more remote.…
An ode to the builder boyfriend
Relationships are about compromise and no wonder so many of us come a cropper in this department when we don’t…
Who is your favourite character in children’s literature?
Rod Liddle Rabbits, always rabbits. I remember at age 13 forcing my poor parents to trudge despondently across hilly downland…
The inherent unfairness of the Olympics
The Olympics can hardly fail to be the greatest show on Earth. For the last two weeks, the world has…
Britain needs to join the new space race
Elon Musk’s Starship is the biggest rocket ever built. Sending it into space is hard; bringing it back to Earth,…
