Magazine
Age discrimination
When I was a precocious Young Conservative, people were most willing to tell me they disagreed with me and I thrived on it. But how much of a challenge does Greta Thunberg have from her classmates or teachers?
Life-creating libraries
‘It turns out I have a local authority lending library in part to thank for setting me off as a writer’
The best of British junk
Inconsequential and vacuous, Cathy Wilkes is the perfect representative for Britain at the Venice Biennale
A question of attribution
The forthcoming sale of a purported Caravaggio is set to exceed £100m, but its provenance is far from clear
Clubland battle of the bookmen
When a gossip columnist criticised Thackeray, Dickens weighed in to savage his rival
Baked-in bias
‘Once social media entities become publishers, any political bias already present will be baked in’
The Bocconi boys take on Keynes
‘If the Bocconi boys’ work is correct, three generations of macroeconomic textbooks should be binned and the fiscalist element in Keynesianism has become intellectual junk’
Bombs reopen Sri Lanka’s divisions
Islamist terror attacks in Colombo revealed government incompetence
Ray of light for cricket’s lengthening shadows
A top-class domestic competition on free-to-air TV could rescue a fragmented sport marginalised by a series of disastrous decisions
Goodbye Mr Kidson, hello witchhunters
My old history teacher was a byword for political incorrectness yet was loved by his pupils. Would he survive in today’s harsher world?
Why Remoaners should back Boris
“Boris, ironically, now offers Remoaners the best chance of a soft Brexit, or at least a sensible one. And to those who want a second referendum—’the people’s vote’—there may even be a chance of that too.”
On the road
“In the summer of 1980, in the grip of some Kerouac-ish fantasy, I opted to hitch-hike from Laredo to New York”
Discovering the Great War of China
A third of a million Chinese labourers helped the Allies defeat the Kaiser, but their huge unsung contribution ended in betrayal