Life
England’s new heroes were real Test Match specials
The weather forecast last Saturday promised 100 per cent likelihood of rain. I like that formulation: it doesn’t leave much…
Parents, not schools, are key to the knowledge gap
The Education Policy Institute (EPI) has just published a report looking at the attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged 16-year-olds…
The turf
Khalid Abdullah, John Gosden and Frankie Dettori — owner, trainer and jockey — already figured among the great names of…
Bridge
Thank heaven I am on holiday! For the past week I have been up until 4 a.m., glued to the…
Classical conundrum
The great Mikhail Botvinnik excoriated chess played at fast time limits. Botvinnik believed that classical chess at time limits of,…
no. 468
Black to play. This is a position from Kramnik–Carlsen, Leuven Blitz 2017. How did the world champion win even more…
Bridge
This is a great time to be a bridge professional — not just for the world’s top players, who have…
British championship
This year’s British Championship starts on Saturday and is endowed with an outstanding prize fund supplied by Capital Developments Waterloo…
no. 467
White to play. This position is from McShane-Istratescu, London 2013. How did White conclude his kingside attack with a fine…
New beginnings
In Competition No. 3008 you were invited to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the…
to 2317:370
The answer to the subtraction sum in the title is 1947. So all the unclued lights are celebrities who celebrate…
Dear Mary
Q. My children are very lucky in that we have bought them all flats. However, they are now renting out…
Epiphanic
‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported…
Wild life
Kenya We are on the beach, where our home is full of dystopian stories. My daughter Eve is whizzing…
The right kind of dumbing down
Thanks to meteoric advances in computational power, it is now possible to take abundant data from a wide range of…
My beef with David Cameron
Insufficient attention has been paid to the history of naughty girls, who deployed allure to prosper in a male-dominated world.…
High Life
Greece I am surfing along the Cycladic islands on Puritan, a 125ft classic that was launched in 1929 by…
The Battle for Britain
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Low life
‘We are always waiting for somebody,’ observed a vexed British journalist. Usually it was me they were waiting for, but…
Real life
Quite stoically, I was mountaineering on my hands and knees over a sea of rubble to get to the temporary…
Now I get it – Corbyn is the new Murdoch
For our 16th wedding anniversary, Caroline and I went to the Almeida Theatre to see Ink, a new play about…
2320: Crossings out
The unclued Across lights become thematic when a suffix is appended. The individual unclued Down lights (one a proper noun)…
2319: Poem III
Unclued lights are words from a famous poem whose title will appear in the completed grid and must be shaded.…
No. 2316: Divine alteration
Redundant words were 12A virgin, 16A crazy, 38A mammal, 18D state, 21D greed, 25D tendon, 34D extremist. These respectively defined…
Dear Mary
Q. Last summer a friend of my brother-in-law’s house-sat for us while we were in Greece for a week. We…
