There is something uniquely dispiriting about the Albanese government’s performance on the international stage. It is normal that different Australian…

What gets my goat

Jimbo takes the reins

We have a failed system

Remarkable never-before-published data from 1871 tells a different tale

Racist labels hide the truth

Trump passes his history test

Will they destabilise the financial system?

Albanese’s Hello Kitty diplomacy no match for Putin-Prabowo bromance

Resource funding suffers an Albo policy hit

Regime change - time to bring back the Shah

I have always cycled everywhere in London, not because I want to save the planet but because I want to…

‘You asshole,’ was my friend’s cheery greeting when we met in Ludlow. I’d mucked up the time. Reconciled, we walked…

Dos Mas Tacos opened recently next to Spitalfields Market, one of London’s trendiest and busiest areas. Two beef birria tacos…

For me, it was the sideboard that did it. Originally the centrepiece of my grandmother’s dining room, upon her death…

Around 5 p.m. on Monday one of Kemi Badenoch’s aides was having a drink with a friend in the Two…

On the first night of what Donald Trump has called the ‘12-day war’ between Israel and Iran, someone spray-painted a…

British politics and ghosts are subjects that rarely meet. Sometimes an MP or parliamentary aide might report a sighting of…

It was clear at the time that what happened on 7 October 2023 would change the Middle East. What was…

Now that parliament has decided to decriminalise abortion, it is interesting to see what the ancients made of the matter.…

On the hottest day of the year, St Pancras station would not have been my first choice for lunch, but…

Home MPs voted by a majority of 23 – 314 to 291 – for the Terminally Ill Adults (End of…

During the Troubles, some 2,500 people were victims of kneecappings – punishment shootings, dished out by paramilitaries, for perceived crimes…

Moral support Sir: All of Tim Shipman’s reasons for the PM’s reluctance to support Israel sound outwardly plausible, though, from…

One peril of a sudden adverse turn of global events is that it provides cover for bad domestic government. If…

The American critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn has just published a new translation of The Odyssey. In his superb introduction,…

It is heartening to see the lefties out marching in defence of mullahs and their enlightened rule of Iran. The…

It was airily pleasant to walk round Parliament Square on Monday morning. I had come up to London to go…

Summer is here – and for some in Labour it cannot come soon enough. After a tricky first year in…

Indisputably a nutjob, Chase Strangio is the soul of nominative determinism. The lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union is…

Begged by his mother to go somewhere his behaviour wouldn’t ‘show so much’, the future novelist, aged 19, embarked on a lifetime of travel and rarely visited Britain again

The ‘Great Partition’ of India in 1947 led to the wider division of Britain’s ‘empire within an empire’ – and to most of the problems plaguing southern Asia today

This ‘amoral outcast’ and its thieving trickery is now widely equated with the economic migrant, slipping across borders unnoticed and threatening the status quo

Little Nettlebed is in the grip of serious drought, and the angry villagers are looking for scapegoats in this irresistible page-turner set in 18th-century Oxfordshire

So Dustin Hoffman tells the teenage Matthew Specktor as they share cigarette breaks at CAA, the Los Angeles talent agency they both frequent

At times one cannot believe what the Gove family endured during frontline government service, and politics gets much of the blame as Vine looks back over the wreckage

In the 1990s and early 2000s, ‘empowerment’ was a girl’s watchword. But she was empowered primarily to be pleasing to men and, above all, never grow up

Signing his real name (a brave decision for a homosexual in 1960), Roger Butler sparked a good deal of discussion on a ‘shunned topic’, which eventually led to a change in the law

In a world of international horrors and hopes it is weird to have one of the weirdest true-life crime stories…

In an interview back in 2021, Adam Curtis explained that most political journalists couldn’t understand his films because they aren’t…

If, as is said, there are only seven basic narratives in human storytelling, then there should be an addendum. In…

There aren’t many dramas featuring the rise of the Nazis that could be described as jaunty, but Outrageous is one.…

The Ministry of Lesbian Affairs is a comedy that feels as sweet and comforting as a knickerbocker glory. The show…

‘So suburban!’ That’s Prince Orlofsky’s catchphrase in the Grange Festival’s new production of Die Fledermaus, and he gets a lot…

In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with…

‘What a lark!’ I thought to myself as I rose on a hot June morning to listen to a documentary…

At a miserable-looking rally for the centre-left Place Publique in mid-March, its co-president, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, made international headlines calling…

Unesco doesn’t hand out world-heritage status to absences, but if it did, there would be memorials all over the western…

The past sometimes intrudes upon the present in curious and unexpected ways. Last week, on SBS, the irresistible and irrepressible…

Is ‘de-escalate’ in the running to be the Word of the Year for 2025? Or (as seems more likely) the…

‘The nuisance of the tropics is/the sheer necessity of fizz.’  Over the past few days, during which England endured sub-tropical…

God, men are pathetic. At least, that’s the view of Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a researcher at Stanford, who has come…

Q. My husband and I have recently made very good friends with some neighbours in France. They know I am…

For the past 25 years I have commuted to London from Otford, a delightful village outside Sevenoaks. I do this…

The FT headline said: ‘Man Group orders quants back to office five days a week.’ I didn’t know what quants…

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I often feel as if I know what it was like to be a member of La…

A few years ago, a friend wrote a cookery book for the UK market, full of gorgeous dishes, many of…

For Competition 3405 you were invited to submit a scene in which Doctor Who has regenerated into someone very unexpected.…

‘I want the stairlift to go faster!’ said my mother, as the machine she was sitting on whirred furiously while…