Curtis Sittenfeld is the great American observer
From our US edition
In Romantic Comedy , we get her insight into a new phenomenon — celebrity of the modern age
Harry Mount
Harry Mount is a barrister, editor of The Oldie and author of How England Made the English (Penguin) and Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever (Bloomsbury).
Thursday
Saturday
Humza Yousaf and Anas Sarwar’s debt to private schools
Humza Yousaf, the favourite to succeed Nicola Sturgeon as Scottish First Minister, has been ticking all the right boxes in his campaign so far. Last week, he declared: ‘As your SNP First Minister, and as someone from a minority background myself, I will stand up and champion equal rights for all.’ I don’t imagine he’ll
Tuesday
Was the Queen Mother ever really funny?
From our US edition
Do Let’s Have Another Drink!: The Dry Wit and Fizzy Life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother by Gareth Russell reviewed
Sunday
What kind of king will Charles III be?
From our US edition
The early signs are that kingship suits the new monarch
Wednesday
Fellowship of the Lamb: how we’re saving Tolkien’s pub
I’ve just bought Tolkien’s pub in Oxford. Well, to be more precise, I and more than 300 fellow drinkers have bought the Lamb and Flag, the 400-year-old Oxford pub where the Inklings group of writers – including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis – drank. Like so many pubs across the country, the Lamb and Flag
Thursday
How to get through a school reunion
T here’s no need for a mirror at school reunions. Just look all around you to see the cruel effects of anno domini on your old contemporaries – and don’t fool yourself that you alone have miraculously dodged the hair-thinning, waist-expanding horrors of middle age. Is that really the semi-divine girl who scored a modelling contract
Thursday
A royal affair
From our US edition
The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil by Tina Brown reviewed
Why I feel sorry for the super-rich
Be honest. Aren’t you a teeny-weeny bit jealous of the super-rich? Are you a little annoyed by the new Sunday Times Rich List – which showed the top ten richest people in the country now have £182 billion between them, more than three times what they had in 2010? Don’t your hackles rise on seeing
Thursday
Who is David Sherborne, libel lawyer to the stars?
If you’re a celeb with a burning grievance, the hottest place in town is an unassuming, Georgian terraced house in Gray’s Inn, Holborn. Five Raymond Buildings is the number one libel set in the country. And its most prominent barrister is David Sherborne, aka ‘Orange Sherbet’ – the permatanned schmoozer with the wind-tugged, auburn tresses.
Thursday
From the brainiacs to the bluffers: a guide to public school stereotypes
A Wykehamist, an Old Etonian and an Old Harrovian are in a bar. A woman walks in. The Old Etonian says: ‘Fetch her a chair!’ The Wykehamist gets it. The Old Harrovian sits in it. It’s the oldest public-school joke in the world — and it still has the ring of truth. (Though you might
Sunday
Fall and decline
From our US edition
After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque through Revolution and War by Helen Rappaport reviewed
Thursday
The problem with rewilding
The government has gone wild. Under new plans, just announced by Environment Secretary George Eustice, farmers and landowners in England could be paid to turn large areas of land into nature reserves and restore floodplains. In place of the old EU subsidies, farmers will be rewarded by the government for how much they care for the
Thursday
How the National Trust's new leader can restore trust
The National Trust has, thank God, appointed a new chairman. What can he do to restore trust in an organisation that has so catastrophically dumbed down and become so woefully political in recent years? Rene Olivieri is an American-born former publishing executive. He has been interim chairman of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the RSPCA
Saturday
Don’t turn Notre Dame into a ‘politically correct Disneyland’
Sacré bleu! Plans are afoot to turn Notre Dame cathedral, once it’s restored, into what some have called a ‘politically correct Disneyland’. The plans, yet to be rubber-stamped, will turn the cathedral into an ‘experimental showroom’, with confessional boxes, altars and classical sculptures replaced with modern art murals. New sound and light effects will be
Sunday
Will the National Trust now end its war on 'Restore Trust'?
Yesterday, at the Trust’s AGM, Restore Trust – the body which wants to stop the dumbing-down and politicisation of the Trust – didn’t win. But it has made an enormous impact for a body which was only set up last summer and now has 20,000 members and a £60,000 war chest. Restore Trust put forward
Thursday
Why is the National Trust waging war against its members?
The National Trust culture war has just stepped up a gear. Ahead of the Trust’s AGM on 30 October, the Trust has launched an extraordinary attack. Its target appears to be Restore Trust, a new body trying to rein in the National Trust’s political obsessions. ‘Our founders set out to protect and promote places of historic interest
Thursday
New world order: can Britain, America and Australia contain China?
43 min listen
In this week’s episode: can the new Aukus alliance contain China? In his cover piece this week, James Forsyth writes that the new Aukus pact has fixed the contours of the next 30 years of British foreign policy. Britain, he says, is no longer trying to stay neutral in the competition between America and China.
End of the line: it’s time to rethink the queue
Flying to Kalamata this week, I did my own little bit to reduce the terrible queues at Heathrow Terminal 5. Heroically, I stacked up the grey luggage trays once they’d been emptied by passengers coming through security. As a result, there were more loaded trays for people to pick up, and a smaller tailback of
Wednesday
The strange allure of double agents
John le Carré, the master of British spy stories, may have died last December, aged 89. But the dastardly world of double agents he relished in exposing lives on. A British man has been arrested in Germany on suspicion of spying for Russia. German federal prosecutors allege that the man — named only as ‘David
Thursday
They weren’t all that pious in the good old days
You need to be wary of being too flattering about English churches. As John Betjeman said: ‘Be careful before you call Weymouth the Naples of Dorset. How many Italians call Naples the Weymouth of Campania?’ Even so, the rise of the English medieval church was extraordinary. As early as 1200 there were 9,500 churches in
