Winter Olympics
Is hooliganism on the way back?
Forty-odd years ago a friend, a Liverpool supporter, somewhat unwisely took his girlfriend to Elland Road for a Leeds match…
Unmasking ‘panda diplomacy’
The star of the Beijing Winter Olympics wasn’t an athlete: it was Bing Dwen Dwen, the spacesuit-clad panda mascot. It…
Barometer
No snow The pistes are covered with artificial snow and the hillsides are bare. Are the Winter Olympics a victim…
China breaks new records in the Surveillance Olympics
Never before have the participants in a major sporting event been so closely monitored as in this Winter Olympics in…
An Olympic task
How China got stuck in a zero-Covid trap
China is right to laugh at the west
Signs of the enervating weakness of the west’s governing elites aren’t that hard to find but the case of the…
I, Tonya is not quite a gold-medal masterpiece
Films about the Winter Olympics don’t grow on conifers. Twenty-five years ago there was Cool Runnings about the Jamaican bobsleigh…
Are these the coldest Winter Olympics ever?
Museums of curiosity The former culture secretary Ed Vaizey suggested that there are quite enough museums in Britain, and that…
This Winter Olympics, don’t knock our fearless Fridge Kids
At this time of the year, well-meaning folk of otherwise sound mind start to get very sniffy about the impending…
Good clean fun
I once forced some pals on a skiing holiday to spend an afternoon off the slopes watching Chalet Girl. Suffice…
Sochi’s spotlight reveals the rottenness at the heart of the Russian body politic
Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter…
Flying boards and killer moustaches
You can trust the BBC to behave like a leaf blown by any breeze, but even that spineless leviathan (if…
Barometer
Our first winter Hopes will not be high for a big haul of British medals in Sochi, but we have…
Putin’s pink peril
Russia’s thuggish President has picked on the wrong minority
Winter warmers
James Cook’s third voyage as an English captain ended in disaster, stabbed to death and disembowelled by a pack of…
High life
Gstaad I’ve met Stephen Fry twice in my life, both times long ago. The first time at a dinner given…
