There’s a great revival under way in the British TV and film industry, but it’s not the BBC that’s behind it. Netflix is normally secretive about its figures but this week published a list of its most popular shows and top of the pile is Bridgerton, which imagines Regency London as a racially mixed society.
Home The crisis of the week was a shortage of fuel at garages. ‘There is no need for people to go out and panic buy,’ said Paul Scully, the small-business minister. That set motorists queueing. BP had shut some petrol stations and blamed a shortage of heavy goods vehicle drivers. Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary,
I am just back from my final salmon fishing trip of the year. I have never had a worse season and have hardly cast a line. This autumn’s almost unprecedented sunshine has been terrible for fishing; the river Tweed had been reduced to a dribble, through which even Alex Salmond could easily lead an invasion
Hardly a day goes by without headlines about immigrants, asylum-seekers and refugees. In the ancient world, movements of people were also very common (state boundaries did not exist), often because war, famine or exile left them with no option. So how did refugees try to win acceptance? In Homer’s world of heroes (c. 700 bc),
Scummy idea Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner called Tories ‘scum’ in a speech to activists at her party’s conference. The word, derived from a 14th-century Dutch word for foam, was first recorded in the sense of an insult in Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine, written in the late 1580s. Referring to Christian slaves kept by the
Parish problems Sir: Emma Thompson draws attention to a serious problem in the Church of England (‘Power to the parish’, 25 September). Why are they trying to make it easier to close down parishes when the parish is where the people are to whom the church must minister? The parish is also the major funder
