Somersaulting beauty of the songmaker
It’s uncanny sometimes how it works. There we were last Saturday in Hamer Hall to hear what Stephen Layton from…
Aussie life
It’s been a long time since the beer garden of the iconic Oaks Hotel in Sydney’s Neutral Bay lost all…
Language
We all know what it means when someone is said to have been ‘thrown under the bus’ by their colleagues…
Mediterranean Gothic: The Sleepwalkers, by Scarlett Thomas, reviewed
Thomas tells her tale of a hellish honeymoon on a Greek island with the cunning of an Aegean sorceress, keeping her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert
The glory of German wines
I have had three recent conversations, all lively if unrelated – and all well lubricated. The first concerned Anglo-Saxon England…
Will I ever get my HRT?
The novelty of living in a place where a policeman called Ambrose lives in a house whose door you can…
Letters: the real problem with a Labour super-majority
Good trade-off Sir: I applaud your excellent editorial (‘Trading in Falsehoods’, 6 April) – a succinct and insightful essay on…
The truth about ‘boardroom diversity’
We all know that increasing the diversity of your boardroom increases the success of your company because politicians, business leaders…
The abortion debate returns
I don’t like talking about abortion and so rarely do. I have never written about it before. I am uncomfortable…
Who uses Grindr?
Meet market Who uses the gay dating app Grindr? – The site claims 27m users worldwide, 80.5% of whom identify…
I want to see a doctor – not do another NHS survey
Nye Bevan did not make old bones, and perhaps that’s just as well. According to a recent British Social Attitudes…
A new survey that may be of interest
My favourite opinion polls are those which elicit enormous shock in the population for stating something everybody knew for ages,…
My father’s greatest act of kindness
I’ve been busy planning a trip to New Zealand and Australia. I’ll be gone for about five weeks from mid-June,…
There are three sides to every story
The psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who died last month aged 90, was perhaps most famous for his dictum that: ‘Nothing in…
Dear Mary: should I encourage guests to strip their beds?
Q. Our son, 17, who is generally a credit to us, has started eating with his mouth open. It’s the…
We ought to banish more words
Why do people say: ‘You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment’? Are they using it as they…
We must never lose the treasured Orkneys
Fertile fields and spectacular sea stacks are matched by an extraordinarily rich, dramatic history. No wonder the islands have been so celebrated for centuries
