Counterpoints
Jam tomorrow
“We do so love a literary rejection, provided it isn’t our own, of course.”
The new normal
“Now nobody, it seems, wants to be seen as normal: not even normal people. But I do. All my life I’ve craved normality and never quite managed it”
Closed Minds
“In Britain’s universities, there is no incendiary debate on Brexit, merely a stunned lack of comprehension and the blithe assumption that all we “nice” people voted to remain”
Mañana, mañana
“Beyoncé got involved in youth voter registration — you could sign up at her concerts — because apparently, without the world’s most famous pop star yelling at us, millennials cannot fill out a life-defining form”
BOGOF, Nanny
“The proposed sugar tax and a prospective ban on BOGOFs — supermarket buy-one, get-one-free offers — are perfect examples of how muddled thinking leads to the busybody interference of the Nanny State”
The art of faking it
On Instagram, there’s nothing cooler than corporate sponsorship — so aspiring influencers are now creating fake sponsored content
Smack down
Has anti-smacking advocacy gone too far?
Little Britain
Miniature paintings suit the modern world — we live in a miniaturised world
Glorious food
The characters in Dickens’s novels have voracious appetites — but how did Dickens dine?
Peer review
There’s nothing to stop us bringing back hereditary peerages — reflecting lifetimes of success rather than political cronyism
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