New zealand

The last Saturday of lockdown — inshallah — and we were discussing literature. Specifically, when does a detective story become a novel? T.S. Eliot edited the World’s Classics edition of The Moonstone and gave a copy to A.E. Housman, with the inscription: ‘The best detective story in English or any other language.’ Surely Eliot was right. The Moonstone and The Woman in White are superb detective fiction. But they are not novels. Poor Wilkie Collins did try to write novels. Nobody read them. Nobody was wise. We more or less agreed. Ian Rankin, Reginald Hill, P.D. James, Dorothy Sayers, James Lee Burke: all regularly cross the frontier into novelism. Perhaps

The conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd makes last summer’s Black Lives Matter mania in British institutions look even stranger. The British Museum, Oxbridge colleges, Sir Keir Starmer, football teams, government departments, Kew Gardens, the National Trust and numerous corporations indulged in various forms of self-abasement. Some ‘took the knee’. At the Ministry of Defence, the permanent secretary, Sir Stephen Lovegrove, broke professional political impartiality by emailing his staff about the ‘deep roots’ of ‘systemic racial inequality’ in Britain, and signing off with a BLM hashtag. He was subsequently promoted to be the UK National Security Adviser. It was never clear why, among the many dreadful

The key to the Union Sir: ‘Love-bombing’ the Scottish electorate with supplemental spending in devolved areas (‘The break-up’, 27 February) is unlikely to prove a decisive tactic in the ongoing battle over Scottish independence. It will never be enough, and the average voter will not distinguish Westminster spend from Holyrood’s. Neither should opposition to an independence referendum be the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party’s primary policy in the upcoming Holyrood election. Falling into the SNP trap of focusing on this issue allows the party to pursue its agenda of confected grievance and division. Secession is the SNP’s preferred battleground, not least because it permits deflection of their record in government.

If ever there was a moment to address the issue of home-schooling, it is now. The pandemic has disrupted teaching, school life and examinations in catastrophic ways. Many children will now never get the education they would have had. But every crisis is an opportunity — and this crisis offers the chance to reform education in radical ways for the better. Britain could learn a lot from New Zealand. Since 1922, the Kiwis have run a state-funded national correspondence school, known now in Maori as Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu (Te Kura for short). In Western Australia, a similar school has existed since 1918 and is known as the

I was once invited to the Cheltenham races and found the experience underwhelming. Everything was too respectable: not nearly Hibernian enough. I had expected to see Blazes Boylan, Flurry Knox, the Joxer and Christy Mahon, propping each other up in a determined attempt to drink the west of England out of Guinness. The reality was much tamer. But there was one source of amusement. By halfway through the afternoon, undeterred by their skill in dispensing losing tips, a lot of my journalistic colleagues had become equine experts. The previous day, these chaps would not have known the difference between a foal and a fetlock. Yet here they were, insisting that

As New Zealand comes to terms with the most deadly terrorist attack ever carried out on its soil, leaders from around the world will be asking their security advisors whether this marks the start of an escalation of right-wing threats and whether their current strategies for defeating this form of extremism are fit for purpose. It has been obvious for several years now that far-right extremism has been growing across western democracies with social media providing the means for a new global connectivity between far-right individuals and groups. In the past three years alone, the UK has experienced two terrorist attacks carried out by far-right extremists (the murder of Jo