When Rishi Sunak addressed his cabinet this week, he tried to strike an optimistic note. Despite Labour’s commanding poll lead, the misery of strikes and the deepening NHS crisis, the Prime Minister said progress was possible, but on one condition: ‘There are challenges we face,’ he said. ‘But when we are united there is nothing
It is rare to find an example of public art which one can applaud, unequivocally, but I think I have found one in London. The educational group Black Blossoms is running a series of lectures as part of the Art on the Underground scheme making the case that – as I had long suspected –
Do you remember the Duke of Edinburgh awards? Some of you may even have one somewhere. An award for map-reading, orienteering or otherwise managing to find your way around in the age before Google Maps and Uber. It was – and still is – a useful scheme, set up by a man who accepted his
Topiary is the art of making something be something it wasn’t. This is achieved by subtraction. By clipping away everything about a yew bush that isn’t a swan, the topiarist creates a representation of that bird in living foliage. The topiarist’s swan is wondrous, but spare a thought for the clippings. Formless, meaningless to the
Optimism can be surprisingly hilarious. In my last novel, two spouses agree to quit the planet once they’ve both turned 80, and the book explores a dozen possible outcomes of their pact. No chapter made me chuckle at the keyboard more than ‘Once Upon a Time in Lambeth’ – in which the couple don’t kill
The Duke of Sussex says that he and his wife can never return to live in the United Kingdom. They will never again perform royal duties. By the same token, surely, they should not be invited to the coronation in May. There has to be a price for publicly attacking the King, the Queen Consort
Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill had an unusually hard act to follow when he was appointed – after stints at Goldman Sachs, the European Central Bank and Harvard – to succeed the free-thinking Andy Haldane in 2021. Pill’s face is still not one most of us recognise, but he’s an interesting speechmaker and
