Features

General rule

12 August 2017 9:00 am

Dwight Eisenhower was right to warn Americans in 1961 of the ‘military industrial complex’, but perhaps it is now the…

How I write

12 August 2017 9:00 am

How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write…

Don’t forget the Yazidis

12 August 2017 9:00 am

As the floodwaters subsided, the Ark drifted across northern Iraq. Finally, with a crunching jolt, it hit dry land. Its…

A tale of two Valleys

12 August 2017 9:00 am

Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of…

‘Dinant’, by J.M.W. Turner, 1839

Watercolour

12 August 2017 9:00 am

Like many artistically inclined children, I was given a set of Daler Rowney watercolours for my birthday one year. My…

Road to nowhere

5 August 2017 9:00 am

When I heard the government’s announcement that petrol and diesel cars are to be banned from 2040, I resorted, as…

You’re fired!

5 August 2017 9:00 am

 Washington D.C. Even a reality show needs good plot twists, and Donald Trump has delivered them like the master he…

A fighting chance

5 August 2017 9:00 am

‘We remember it not only for the rain that fell, the mud that weighed down the living and swallowed the…

Girl power

5 August 2017 9:00 am

England won the cricket World Cup for the fourth time. Huzzah! England reached the semi-finals of the European football championship.…

Snapping point

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Our family holiday snaps used to be slides. We’d gather in the sitting room while Dad clicked through each one.…

Whither Ukip?

5 August 2017 9:00 am

‘Some wine? How about a beer? Shall we settle into a good old pub?’ I make these suggestions to Ukip’s…

The Surrey hills

5 August 2017 9:00 am

I live in the oldest village in England. How come? Well, in a field below the big house, there is…

Riot chic

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Last weekend, I got into a conversation with the son of an old friend. He’s a nice middle-class boy, mid-twenties,…

The Magnolia Cup: Will the race be to the Swift?

Goodwood

29 July 2017 9:00 am

The South Downs cover 260 sq miles from Hampshire’s Itchen Valley to Eastbourne in East Sussex. Nestled near the southernmost…

‘I like making things’

29 July 2017 9:00 am

Sir James Dyson would make a good therapist for anxious Brexiteers. Everything about him is comfortingly precise — his manner…

Trump’s eastern front

29 July 2017 9:00 am

 Kiev There is no lavatory paper to be found in government buildings in Kiev. Plan ahead, locals advise, if you…

Persistent buggers

29 July 2017 9:00 am

The credit for decriminalising male homosexuality in 1967 — for those over 21 in England and Wales at least —…

Blatant not latent

29 July 2017 9:00 am

It’s exactly 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised male homosexuality, received the Royal Assent on 27…

Diana the diva

29 July 2017 9:00 am

Twenty years in August since Diana died. The anniversary is sad for me on many levels — she was definitely…

Is Macron’s vanity presidency already falling apart?

29 July 2017 9:00 am

The French president’s embarrassing attempts to reinvent himself as the new Tony Blair are not working

Amsterdam Notebook

22 July 2017 9:00 am

When my husband and I arrived in our adored Amsterdam on a sun-drenched schoolday afternoon — less than an hour…

The land of lost content – best seen on horseback

Shropshire

22 July 2017 9:00 am

I found the land of lost content last week, west of the Clee Hills in the Shropshire Housman wrote about,…

Test of time

22 July 2017 9:00 am

I first walked into the Oval as a small boy in the early 1950s. My family home was in Brixton,…

Deus ex machina

22 July 2017 9:00 am

Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook could be to its users what churches are to congregations: it could help them feel…

Must Colston fall?

22 July 2017 9:00 am

Edward Colston, mega-rich philanthropist around the year 1700, is the nearest thing Bristol has to a patron saint. The largest…