My vote winner? Banning ‘fun’ runs
One of us must once have told a political pollster: ‘I really have no idea at all who I’m going…
Were the Ancient Greeks shameless?
Last week Mary Wakefield discussed the virtues of her ‘Victorian’ education, designed to stiffen the upper lip of the young…
Wonderfully special: La chimera reviewed
La chimera, which, as in English, means something like ‘the unrealisable dream’, is the latest film from Italian writer/director Alice…
Georgia is on the brink of revolution
For weeks, the Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi has looked like a battlefield. Thousands of protestors, mostly in their twenties, have…
Why did C.J. Sansom approve this moronic Disney+ Shardlake adaptation?
What would C.J. Sansom have made of the Disney+ version of his novel series about 16th-century crookback lawyer Matthew Shardlake?…
What Xi wants in Europe
On a quiet street in Belgrade, a bronze statue of Confucius stands in front of a perforated white block, the…
A gripping podcast about America’s obsession with guns
The love affair between so many Americans and their guns – long a source of international fascination – appears to…
Fascinating insight into the mind of Michelangelo
You’re pushing 60 and an important patron asks you to repeat an artistic feat you accomplished in your thirties. There’s…
Sex and the shires: Plum Sykes reveals all
‘I looked at a picture of him today and thought: “Why are you wearing those expensive clothes, you twit?”’ Plum…
The endless fascination of volcanoes
Tamsin Mather is the latest highly articulate volcanologist to combine vivid personal experience with thoughtful scientific explanation
Kindness backfires: Sufferance, by Charles Palliser, reviewed
When the father of a family takes in a lost young girl from a minority ethnic group, he puts his own household at risk as racial persecution mounts
The traditional British hedge is fast vanishing
The best hedges teem with the biodiversity that plays such a vital part in our future. Yet, since the 1950s, farmers and developers have been destroying them at an alarming rate
