Brexit bolters
Where are Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and George Osborne? It was as if they couldn’t wait to leave Parliament, having got what they could out of the system, with no thought of putting something back
Act of assent
Was Her Majesty waiting behind the scenes in Westminster, ready to provide her Royal Assent to the EU Withdrawal Act? The reality is more mundane
Hot for lunch
If there is an art to writing after three courses and wine, I never mastered it. But now that the long, boozy lunch is endangered, I’m having serious second thoughts
A future foretold
The long-awaited sequel to A Very British Coup
Dog days
‘If every writer who disliked what other contributors wrote decided to withdraw their work, there would be no papers, no magazines, perhaps no telly’
Outsider values
“The dispute over Parkfield’s “No Outsiders” scheme shows that some people are eager for the state to take over”
Free to choose
The view that children need to go out alone, play unsupervised, take risks and learn independence and resilience speaks to something important that Western societies have largely lost
Brought to book
Mathematics publishing is a soft touch. The publisher usually hasn’t a clue, so they send the manuscript to someone like me to comment on. I used to be a soft touch too
Dog days
‘If every writer who disliked what other contributors wrote decided to withdraw their work, there would be no papers, no magazines, perhaps no telly’
Outsider values
“The dispute over Parkfield’s “No Outsiders” scheme shows that some people are eager for the state to take over”
Free to choose
The view that children need to go out alone, play unsupervised, take risks and learn independence and resilience speaks to something important that Western societies have largely lost
Brought to book
Mathematics publishing is a soft touch. The publisher usually hasn’t a clue, so they send the manuscript to someone like me to comment on. I used to be a soft touch too
A squarer mile
For better or worse, that City has undergone a revolution. Its old guard has been seen off, or paid off
Foie Gove
Michael Gove’s plan to ban foie gras is an essentially frivolous self-advertisement
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