England
What Uber rides taught me about immigration
It was blessedly cool inside the Romanesque nave, its massive arches resisting the heat as they had done everything else…
Britain and Islam – the real special relationship
In all the agonising about Islamism, and what to do about it, it would be a mistake to forget a…
Labour’s England problem
My party needs to stop being scared of patriotism
Reasons to be cheerful, parts one, two, three…
Well the sun is out, the sky is blue, and poor Boris Johnson is taking such a pounding from Matthew…
Emma Thompson’s wrong, and not just about the EU
At first glance, Emma Thompson’s intervention in the Brexit debate earlier this week didn’t make much sense. Asked at the…
State of the Union
Last year, the United Kingdom came within 384,000 votes of destruction. A referendum designed to crush the Scottish nationalists instead…
The Lake District
Cumberland and Westmorland Wrestling is the best thing in the Lake District. I lived near Wigton, just north of the…
Diary
Jeremy Corbyn has been compared to plenty of people over the past few months — a geography teacher, Michael Foot,…
Diary
‘Devon, Devon, Devon/ Where it rains six days out of seven.’ Nothing beats a British seaside holiday. And north Devon…
Best of enemies
Why nothing in sport beats thrashing the Aussies at cricket
Diary
My Cambodian daughter and her husband have just got married again. Wedding One was a Buddhist affair in our drawing…
North Cornwall
In a documentary filmed at the end of his life, Sir John Betjeman, who lived in the village of Trebetherick…
Picnics
Strange, isn’t it, that despite having such famously terrible weather, we Brits are so fond of a picnic. It’s something…
Letters
Growing congregations Sir: I would like to take issue with Damian Thompson (‘Crisis of faith’, 13 June) and his assertions…
The farm that went wild
A piece of ancient England is being reborn around a castle in Sussex
This is England
At the Turner Prize dinner of 2003, as the winner, Grayson Perry, took a photo call with his family wearing…
Living history
It has been a while since the BBC really pushed the boat out on the epic history documentary front. Perhaps…
The power of collective grievance
When last Sunday Pope Francis took the brave step of acknowledging the Armenian tragedy as the ‘first genocide of the…
The war on rural England
The coalition is letting developers concrete over the countryside, but that won’t help young people buy houses
A divided inheritance
When we consider poets who perished before their day, thoughts turn to the Romantics or the war victims: Burns, Keats,…
It takes a village (or six)
Can England’s 10,000 rural churches survive?
Low life
My grandson and I had a lovely hour-long swim at the leisure centre. We had the learner pool to ourselves…
Hunting
This time three years ago, I hadn’t jumped a single thing for almost ten years. This season, I am happily…
Diary
An embarrassing confession: in the late 1960s, I was a Trotskyite. But that period of political adolescence has its uses.…
The fairy census
An eccentric English tradition has attracted fresh academic attention
