Columns

‘The Baltic democracies accomplished what their allies to the West still have not: they hardened their societies without undermining their democratic institutions’

‘The cyclist’s pent-up hostility and cavalier attitude to rules finds its apotheosis in confrontations with pedestrians’

‘Forget sponges, corals, sea fans, and sea weed: ancient, blossoming sea forests and coral reefs are now Flanders trenches’

‘The Russian’s gift to the monarch was an arctic bird that, like Putin, had no natural place in the desert: a white Gyrfalcon, a powerful raptor that can be trained by its master to kill on command’

‘We all had a teacher who inspired us to learn and to become better people. But today teaching is too often only an opportunity for determined individuals to push their agenda’

‘I’m 52, damn it, even if I feel frustratingly closer to 82 on the bad days when my fingers are too weak to type or too stiff to do up buttons’

Democracy triumphed in December’s election, but Scotland remains a significant Tory dilemma

‘The issues are tricky: transgender people’s understandable desire to pursue happiness as members of the opposite sex can impinge on people born that way’

Birds’ names tell tall stories