Life
Tourist misinformation
In Competition No. 3058 you were invited to supply snippets of mischievously/sadistically misleading advice for foreign tourists visiting Britain, or…
2369: Prodigious
Each of ten clues contains a misprinted letter in the definition part. Corrections of misprints spell a word which can…
to 2366: The square
THE RUSSIA HOUSE, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and A MURDER OF QUALITY are novels by JOHN (41) LE CARRÉ, whose…
War and monsters: my new favourite author
If you’re looking for a good beach read this summer, look no further. A few weeks ago I was reading…
The battle for Britain
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A friendly purr from a fallible Tiger Woods
So in the end it was a fallible Tiger that won all hearts at the Open, not the glowering, red-shirted…
Dear Mary: How can we make an ungrateful relative acknowledge a £500 cheque?
Q. My wife’s much younger sister is lazy and impossible. She forgets birthdays, is invariably late, lets people down and…
The parking is better than the food: Nando’s reviewed
Nando’s, c. 1987, is a restaurant in the Great North Leisure Park, Finchley, N12, off the North Circular, which is my…
Mind your language: County lines
We are suddenly all expected to know that county lines are to do with the selling of illegal drugs in…
Watch out, London: I might be moving back
New York I am seriously thinking of moving back to London. The family insists on it. New York, they say,…
Portrait of a seven-year-old state-run child
Saturday morning. Quarter to 12. Sit-down fish and chips at the Silver Grill: me, Oscar and Oscar’s cousin Atticus. Atticus…
It was either new carpets – or happy dogs
Instead of carpeting the upstairs of the house, I had grass fragments removed from the dogs’ ears. I can’t say…
The man who rode 2,300 winners
For Coleridge, ‘…the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind…
Bridge
Last Friday, merrily on my way to Young Chelsea (still the best IMPs duplicate in town), I couldn’t know that…
Mental sport
Sporting commentators frequently resort to chess metaphors to convey the flavour of a particular contest. In the case of football, chess tends…
no. 515
Black to play. This is from Carlsen-Polgar, Mexico 2012. Judit had been struggling in this game but when Carlsen slipped…
Net effect
In Competition No. 3057 you were invited to submit a short story entitled ‘The day the internet died’. Phyllis…
2368: Cobbled together
The unclued lights (two of two words, and the rest paired) are of a kind. Across 1 Book with…
to 2365: Beds
GARDEN (at 46 Across) reveals the theme. Paired solutions are ‘gardens’ in ‘countries’; 8/10, 32/1D, 33/28+29, 12/36, 37/34, 38/2, and…
Teen Vogue and the rebirth of Radical Chic
Are we witnessing the rebirth of Radical Chic? That was the term coined by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay…
The Battle for Britain
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When it comes to new technology, we’re all Luddites at heart
When I saw my first jogger in Wales in the early 1970s, I assumed he was running away from the…
Dear Mary: My friend always has food around his mouth. How can I help him?
Q. A dear friend of my husband, a shy bachelor, is an acquired taste. Once you acquire it you are…
Tradition and terroir: the new reign in Spain is producing great results
The Kingdom of Spain always sends outstanding ambassadors to the Court of St James, none more so than the appropriately…
‘Living with’ is now a thing – usually followed by something nasty like Alzheimer’s
I’m not at all sure about the formula a person living with, followed by something unwelcome, such as Alzheimer’s disease,…
