A photographer searching for an image to capture the true strangeness of early 21st-century life could do worse than to visit Heathrow's Terminal 5 this week where, amid the throng of August holidaymakers, a philosopher is at work. Occasionally, he...
Read moreThere is nothing quite like big-time, high-profile sport to influence non-sporting behaviour in wider society. As the football season gets under way, we shall soon be hearing how some incident involving a player (pampered, overpaid, ill-disciplined) or a manager (ill-tempered,...
Read moreEd Vaizey, the culture spokesman of a party long on political ambition but short on policy, must have been delighted with this week's bright idea. A Conservative government, he has said, would consider forcing the BBC to sell off its...
Read moreIt must sometimes be frustrating to be the director of the Edinburgh International Festival. Throughout August, the headlines tend to be about comedians, buskers, contortionists and body-piercers, with the Fringe rather perversely pushing the concerts, dance, opera and drama of...
Read moreThere have been problems on the moors in advance of the Glorious Twelfth, today's opening of the grouse-shooting season. Successive damp summers have accelerated the spread of the heather beetle, which destroys the birds' habitat. There have been worries that...
Read moreIt has been an excellent summer so far for the Smug Marrieds. Those grim representatives of connubial bliss, invented by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones during the 1990s, will have been delighted to read the various pro-matrimony reports and surveys of...
Read moreThe Queen has asked a simple but pertinent question of the nation's economists. Visiting the London School of Economics at the end of last year, she wondered out loud why no one had managed to foresee this "awful recession". The...
Read moreThe best way to control people, as any competent dictator will know, is to get them to police themselves. No citizen is more comprehensively cowed and disempowered than one who believes himself to be at the mercy of other ordinary...
Read moreChilling with the kids at the Latitude Festival this weekend, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Ben Bradshaw, looked extraordinarily relaxed for someone whose ministry had just dealt a hammer blow to musical expression in the UK....
Read moreIf only modern Britain were more like Wootton Bassett. That thought must have passed through many minds since the first press and TV accounts reported, a matter of weeks ago, how a small Wiltshire town has taken upon itself the...
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