Issue: September 2020
Swap till you drop
Thomas Woodham-Smith enjoys a great trade tradition
Pond life with Mum
Patrick Galbraith says water can be a great healer
Survival of the fittest
Fiona Duncan looks at the winners and losers as the hospitality sector copes with Covid-19
Capturing the wrong picture
Why bother with accuracy when you can get away with approximation?
Training for nothing
Nick Cohen laments the pandemic’s effect on competitions
Who let the dons out?
Leave literary reviews to reviewers rather than score-settling academics
Not tickety-boo
Joseph Connolly had never suffered a day’s illness — until he was felled by a “very unglamorous stroke”
Why I “took the knee”
Following a brief loss of balance in a London watering hole I ‘took the knee’ – but that doesn’t detract from the symbolism
Artists shaped by war
Practically all the artists in the book are traumatised in one way or another, and all experienced war
Waiting for – anything
Krapp’s last tape might these days be a collection of WhatsApps and stored Instagram images, muses Anne McElvoy
Most Read
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
International Women’s Day is useless for women
IWD has become a celebration of evasion and irrationality
Outside the box
why traditional topiary is
making a comeback
Game of Thrones star steals the show
Steal, Amazon Prime’s enthralling new six-part financial crime thriller
Is Keir Starmer failing?
To fail at something, he would have to do something
Trump: the imprudent king
The President has so far achieved the opposite of what he promised
Grin and bear it
Carelessness and frivolity sabotage any attempt at a serious discussion
The masculinity crisis is a porn crisis
We have to do more to challenge the reshaping of culture by pornography
An unpleasant man, and a genius
The most interesting people are not necessarily the most attractive
The Islamic identity crisis
V.S. Naipaul was prophetic on the struggles between Islam and modernity
New model Auntie
David Elstein spells out the big decisions that Matt Brittin, the BBC’s new director-general, needs to make very quickly in order to save the Corporation
Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law
Punishing anyone before they have even been convicted of anything makes me uneasy