Opinion

So, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time in Guy’s Hospital recently, accompanying my brother-in-law who’s terminally ill with cancer to his consultations and treatments. It’s a hospital I know well – having already seen birth and death there, as well as being diagnosed with – and receiving ongoing treatment for – a myeloid […]

The nation-states of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia are located in Caucasia, the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, no more than 350 miles across at its narrowest point, which is mostly taken up topographically by the Caucasus mountain range. These three countries are widely, but by no means universally, considered to be […]

I miss the days when I’d think nothing of looking at my diary and seeing I had a lunch with someone like Eartha Kitt. The reputation of the West End stage meant that the greatest performers from all over the world were continually converging upon it. I realise now how I took that for granted, […]

An archipelago of 10 islands 350 miles off the coast of Senegal, Cape Verde is a place that was made by slavery. Its islands of jungle, mountains and volcanic landscapes were uninhabited until the Portuguese arrived in 1462, but it then became a key staging post in the transatlantic slave trade, developing a population of […]

We don’t worry enough about giant monster attacks. Granted, we have problems enough, what with pestilence and political tumult, to be fretting over things whose actual existence is, at best, disputed, but if this year has taught us anything, it’s that nothing can be dismissed as impossible. In lieu of more formal contingency planning, the […]

I read that Dame Julie Walters, having recently turned 70 and survived a brush with cancer, has said that she’s considering retiring from acting, although she might be tempted back to do Mamma Mia 3 if it happens. What’s perhaps interesting about this announcement is the fact that it’s considered newsworthy at all… A woman […]

I work in a hut that stands on a floodplain on the edge of the Broads and I often see marsh harriers from my desk: wings in a shallow dihedral, balanced on the edge of a stall, a bird of prey and a virtuoso of slowness. They’ve been extinct once, almost twice as a British […]

LIZ GERARD on how the Daily Star became the voice of the people – while The Sun speaks for Boris Johnson alone. The Daily Star speaks for the nation. Who would have thought it? Fleet Street’s most downmarket tabloid is the country’s acknowledged expert on giant mutant rats, psycho seagulls and lager lout wasps. It […]

Given the low-level background dread that is life in 2020, picking out any individual source of anxiety can often be all-but impossible – but one obvious exception for many of us is looking towards the impending US presidential election, now less than two weeks away. In the pit of our stomachs, many of us have […]

As the election results came in from New Zealand I was lucky enough to be able to celebrate with a small (fewer than six!) group of Kiwis, close friends and former colleagues of victorious Jacinda Ardern. With so much bad news around, it was great to be able to enjoy a stunning Labour victory; a […]

Lockdown is, for almost everybody, a new phenomenon that has created feelings of anxiety about a range of issues, particularly how to deal with the threat of the virus itself. Covid-19 is an invisible threat from which the best protection appears to be to hide – perhaps in the hope that it will go away.  […]

Did you hear the door slam on Britain’s post-Brexit trade negotiations with the EU27 after Boris Johnson declared them broken off last Friday night? No, neither did deaf old me. But nor did BBC One’s News at Ten which opted to lead its bulletin on Whitehall’s parallel standoff with Covid-hit Manchester, also going badly for […]

A quiet town perched on the banks where the Seine and Oise rivers meet, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine is not one of Paris’s notorious banlieues. Around 20 miles northwest of the capital, it is certainly in its orbit but the quiet streets and restrained, low-rise buildings mean it feels more provincial French than Parisian. Pleasant, and rather unremarkable. […]

Once anticipated as a key milestone on the road to an agreement, this month’s European Council and its aftermath have instead led to greater uncertainty about the prospects of a deal. The signs are not encouraging. With EU leaders standing firm, an expression of disappointment by the UK chief negotiator, Lord Frost, on Friday was […]

The latest phase of Brexit stumbles towards a predictably shambolic end. As with earlier episodes the familiar deluded posturing from the British government is part of the stumbling. After the EU summit, a deadline set by Boris Johnson for a trade deal, Number Ten proclaimed with the usual discordant swagger that the EU negotiators need […]

MARTYN SLOMAN on the furore over an advert which revealed an underlying political issue. Rarely does an issue on skills training cause public controversy.  There has however been a recent exception.   A high-profile government-sponsored advertising campaign suggested that a young ballerina’s next job could be in cyber (“she just doesn’t know it yet!”). It […]

The contenders are… THE DAILY EXPRESS With fingers crossed and touching wood, the American election that is now less than two weeks away looks to be not going too well for Donald Trump. Unless, of course, you are a reader of the Express online, where recent headlines have included “Joe Biden on brink as Donald Trump […]

“I’m skint,” said Nigel Farage three years ago, blaming “20 years of spending more than you earn”. Who better, then, to launch a new service advising people on what to do with their money? With a characteristically breezy lack of shame, this is exactly what the nicotine-stained man-frog has done. Fortune & Freedom With Nigel […]

Recent developments in the Middle East do not represent a significant shift towards the settling of the fundamental problems that still blight the region, says PAUL KNOTT The recent agreements normalising relations with some small Arab states are a success for Israel. For decades, it has sought recognition from the Arab world while avoiding making […]

One of the few times that Columbo was almost killed by a person he was investigating was in a 1994 episode called Butterflies In Shades Of Grey. It starred William Shatner as a radio talk show host who killed a friend of his stepdaughter. What is remarkable about the episode is that it is the first time […]

Liz Gerard is correct to identify the first-past-the-post electoral system as a major cause of our divisive and dysfunctional politics and to say that electoral reform is the only way to escape this. However, she is mistaken to describe the alternative vote (AV), the subject of the 2011 referendum, as “a sort of PR” – […]

I must take exception to Phil Green’s letter “Bodge job” (TNE # 214) comparing the prime minister to beloved sitcom character Captain Mainwaring of Dad’s Army.  The Home Guard leader may have at times been “blustering, incompetent, pompous and inept”, but he was also patriotic, courageous, inclusive and humane, not to mention capable of inspiring […]

Boris Johnson’s spinmeisters have been going on a lot just lately about how “Churchillian” his rhetoric has been. Ian Blackford, the SNP politician, was probably closer to the mark when he characterised what Johnson had been saying – and his delivery – as “yapping, bumbling, mumbling”. I’ve no doubt, too, that if Robert Hardy were […]

PETER TRUDGILL on some obvious, and less obvious, origins of place names. On the east coast of the North Island of New Zealand, there is a place called Buffalo Beach. This is something of a surprise, because New Zealand has no indigenous terrestrial mammals, and absolutely zero buffalo. In fact, in order to understand the […]

Like many of you, I’ve made some new discoveries over the course of this virus-beset year. I read, both on social and ‘regular’ media, of people finding new hobbies, new TV shows to box-binge, new podcasts to follow, new books to read. I myself have stumbled upon something rather wonderful, something I perhaps didn’t realise […]

It seems an age since I was bemoaning the presence of FriendsFest – a static exhibition and performance event celebrating the quondam sitcom – in my local park. That was over a year ago, but the delving and diggings in the hallowed turf remain. Obviously the pandemic put paid to the punters kicking up divots […]

Dido Harding seems to make a habit of taking on roles for which, on paper, she is unsuitable. At private school, she was captain of the basketball team despite her diminutive stature. “At 5ft 3 inches she was captain which just seems ridiculous when most basketball players these days are 6ft 10,” recalls an old […]

Seven months after lockdown and we continue to watch aghast as western leaders grapple with the consequences of Covid-19 and their often cack-handed responses. Given the low expectations of an increasingly cynical electorate, there are no prizes for guessing which party leader enjoys the most positive net approval ratings: Nicola Sturgeon. The first minister of […]

A long time ago (2004 to be precise) in a galaxy far away (but not that far away) a young right winger established a think tank (as almost everyone was doing at the time). The right winger was called Dominic Cummings and the short-lived think tank was portentously titled the New Frontiers Foundation. All of […]

Never mind the polls in the race for the White House, a new survey shows a more complex picture of America’s deeper fault lines. The bitter polarisation of the American election is only too obvious. For many of us, the contours of the battle are clear: in one corner, Joe Biden: a decent, moderate candidate […]

The world knows by now that Kamala Devi Harris, the junior senator from California and number two at the top of the Democrats’ electoral ticket this election cycle, was born in October 1964 to a Jamaican father and a Tamil Nadu mother. Both were immigrants and both were PhDs. Her babyhood was spent being taken […]

Piers Morgan is one of those Marmite characters people tend either to love or to hate. My relationship with him is more complicated, and can and does veer between the two. One of the things that is often said of him, and of me, is that we have strong opinions, never change them, and always […]