Life
Dear Mary: how can I avoid my friend’s awful favourite restaurant?
Q. Almost a year ago I attended the funeral of my godfather — a bachelor and distant relation whom I…
The Battle for Britain | 19 September 2020
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Changing the rules
Nothing courts us so nimbly as technology. Perhaps the chess computers have already won you over — I am dazzled…
No. 622
Black to play. Jones–McShane, London Chess Classic 2019. Last year I played two games of no-castling chess with Gawain Jones,…
Spectator competition winners: poems in praise of naked cyclists
In Competition No. 3166 you were invited to supply a poem either celebrating or lamenting the cancellation of Philadelphia’s annual…
2475: Poem VI
Unclued lights are ten words taken from a poem quoted in ODQ. The poet’s name (two words) will appear diagonally…
2472: All-inclusive solution
The perimeter quotation is from Mahler. Remaining unclued lights were names of symphonies: 12A Mahler / Schubert; 26A Haydn; 39A…
The WFH community are finally walking their own dogs — with terrible consequences
Every time I get on a horse I have to face the likelihood that a dog, or pack of dogs,…
What Barbara Black’s choice of friends says about her
Gstaad I’m not usually nonplussed, but this is very strange: the memoir of Barbara Black, the wife of my…
Bridge | 19 September 2020
My friend Ollie Burgess has just made the bold move of quitting his job in Manchester, and moving to London…
Why French car-boot sales are good for my mental health
Hairpin bends in a stony forest. Downhill. Steep, then steeper. Smooth frictionless tarmac. I’ve got the car barely under control.…
With good wine, it’s all in the timing
Three bottles, three questions that delivered three different answers. I was in Dorset — cannot keep away — enjoying the…
I admit it: I was wrong to back Boris
A friend emailed me earlier this week in despair about the Prime Minister. ‘Boris reminds me of a hereditary king…
The heirs to Frankie Dettori
It is all, it seems, in the tweaks. So said Aidan O’Brien, Ireland’s master-trainer supreme, before his tough filly Magical…
How a ‘back’ gets confused for a ‘bat’
My husband may not often be right, but he had some cogent criticism of the much-quoted words of Geoffrey Howe…
Aussie Life & Language
Giles Auty While clearing our cellar recently my wife and I came upon a compact printing press which her late…
Being a do-gooder did me no good at all
Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard political philosopher, has a lot to answer for. Some armchair psychologists think the reason I…
Was the maskless man in my carriage dying of Covid?
A man without a mask appeared to be dying of Covid, or something quite like it, on the London to…
Foden and Greenwood’s ingenious Icelandic rendezvous
You suspect that a bar of duty-free Toblerone, no matter how supersized, wouldn’t really do the trick when hapless England…
Dear Mary: How can I get my social skills back after lockdown?
Q. I have just been out to my first lunch in months. Ten of us sat around a table in…
The apex of civilisation: the Connaught Grill reviewed
A ghost review, now, of a ghost restaurant: the Connaught Grill, which is yet to reopen after pandemic shuttered its…
The pleasures — and pain — of dog-walking
The old dog was in a companionable frame of mind and she trotted along at my side, glancing up now…
Bridge | 12 September 2020
The bridge world has lost some glittering stars this (ghastly) year, the latest being France’s Catherine d’Ovidio — multiple world…
From Covid to football, the rise in ‘upticks’
Political commentators love talking about the optics — the way something looks to voters. Just at the moment, though, everyone…
The Battle for Britain | 12 September 2020
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