L ast week, at a cost of a billion pounds or so, the Chancellor announced a package of measures to boost the housing market, including a temporary raising of the stamp duty...

David Cameron, not least my regular visits to Portcullis House, the ugly upside-down cow’s udder opposite the Commons (it was designed by Michael Hopkins, although it looks as...

JAMES FORSYTH When the Tories get complacent, they should think of what Palin has done to Obama I f Labour does dump Gordon Brown before the next election, then each of the...

CHARLES MOORE T his column and its readers have just won our first battle in our long war. The BBC Trust has announced that it will investigate the way in which the television...

us doing a U-turn on our pledge to match Labour’s spending plans. You can’t do a U-turn if you were never going to go a particular way in the first place. Or if you went for a...

The PM’s claim to have created three million British jobs is a grave deceit, says Fraser Nelson . Strip out immigrants from the picture, and Labour has barely dented the problem...

At a Google conference in Rhodes, Matthew d’Ancona finds himself part of a bid to break the world record for Zorba dancing — and to relive one of the greatest scenes in cinema...

Russia’s President, Dmitry Medvedev, pretends that this republic is a haven of stability. Not so, says Tom Parfitt : the Ingush are subject to a campaign of murder and...

My husband’s club was closed in August, which meant, paradoxically, that I saw less of him, because he enjoyed the chance to exercise reciprocal rights at other clubs, which I...

Dubai as an entrepôt O ver the past thirty years, the Dubai economy has been boosted by the general rise in oil prices. But with its oil reserves likely to run out over the...

Clemency Burton-Hill talks to the American playwright Christopher Shinn about his new play about a US presidential election night in the era of MySpace and YouTube L ooking...

These narcissistic adolescent halfwits should not fill us with fear, says Rod Liddle . The aircraft plot trial showed yet again that those who wish to murder us with fizzy pop...

But private schools, private tutors and bestselling books are filling the vacuum, says Harry Mount . Larkin was right: there is a hunger in us all ‘to be more serious’ T he...

Sir: Kirsten Dunst never insisted that I ban Toby Young (Status anxiety, 6 September) from the set of How To Lose Friends & Alienate People . Toby’s piece stemmed from a recent...

Sir: Robert Hardman believes that ‘Up to now, only one monarch in history has celebrated a diamond jubilee’ (‘Never mind the Olympics — get set for the Jubilee’, 6 September)....

Sir: M.A. de A Brandao is right (Letters, 6 September) to draw attention to the brutality of the Germans and Japanese in the second world war, and he is probably right to assert...

truly honour our heroes if we acknowledge our villains as well. Leo Quirk Via email

Sir: Judi Bevan is mistaken (‘Nice pork, pity about the pizza’, 6 September) in thinking the middle class don’t shop at Lidl; I modelled green corduroys in the first Boden...

Sir: According to Taki (High life, 6 September), quoting the Victorian secretary of the Alpine Club, ‘goblins and devils’ had long vanished from the Swiss Alps by the middle of...

Sir: Peter Cooch (Letters, 6 September) is correct: the line ‘What we need at this stage of the war is a futile gesture’ first appeared in Beyond the Fringe , not Blackadder ....

I n these straitened days, when the international money markets teeter nervily between relief and panic, and stock exchanges hang upon the slightest twitch of one of Alistair...

W hen is too old? When too young? Almost every day I hear a story of someone, at the height of his power and energy, being compulsorily retired at 60. Or there is a fuss because...

Labour’s climate change levy has led to lower emissions, says Elisabeth Jeffries , but can the Conservative alternative yield better results — or command business support? T...

Richard Northedge I f Britain’s housebuilders really want to sell more homes, they ought to slash their prices rather than lobby the government for packages like last week’s...

Sam Leith O UR T IMES by A. N. Wilson Hutchinson, £25, pp. 720, ISBN 9780091796716 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 W ith Our Times , A. N. Wilson concludes the sequence of...

Francis King T HE O THER G ARDEN AND C OLLECTED S TORIES by Francis Wyndham Picador, £7.99, pp. 403, ISBN 9780330457200 ✆ £6.39 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 T here are...

Andro Linklater A LASDAIR G RAY : A S ECRETARY ’ S B IOGRAPHY by Rodge Glass Bloomsbury, £25, pp. 341, ISBN 9780747590156 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 I t would be...

Sarah Burton S TAR OF THE M ORNING : T HE E XTRAORDINARY L IFE OF L ADY H ESTER S TANHOPE by Kirsten Ellis Harper Press, £25, pp. 464, ISBN 9780007170302 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p)...

Lee Langley G HOST T RAIN TO THE E ASTERN S TAR by Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton, £20, pp. 485, ISBN 9780241142530 ✆ £16.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 W hen Paul Theroux set...

John Michell M ICHAEL X: A L IFE IN B LACK AND W HITE by John Williams Century, £11.99, pp. 281, ISBN 9781846050954 ✆ £9.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 P oor Michael. His...

Philip Ziegler E TTIE : T HE I NTIMATE L IFE AND D AUNTLESS S PIRIT OF L ADY DESBOROUGH by Richard Davenport-Hines Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £25, pp. 450, ISBN 9780297851745 ✆...

Raymond Carr POMPEII by Mary Beard Profile, £25, pp. 315, ISBN 9781861975164 ✆ £20 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 I n the early morning of 25 August AD 79 Mount Vesuvius blew...

Caroline Moorehead L ETTERATI : A N U NAUTHORISED L OOK AT S CRABBLE AND THE P EOPLE W HO P LAY IT by Paul McCarthy ECW Press, £12.99, pp. 240, ISBN 9781550228281 ✆ £10.39...

Surprising literary ventures Gary Dexter U NDERMINING THE C ENTRAL L INE (1989) by Ruth Rendell and Colin Ward R uth Rendell, it turns out, as well as being the queen of...

Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks back to the early 20th century when organs were in their heyday ‘A s in England, in America the organ is King,’ wrote the French organ-composer Louis...

Lloyd Evans Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress Leicester Square Theatre Liberty Globe Sons of York Finborough organ curator of the Royal Festival Hall. But...

Andrew Lambirth Francis Bacon Tate Britain (sponsored by Bank of America), until 4 January 2009 A t Tate Britain is a glorious centenary show of paintings by one of our...

Giannandrea Poesio Matthew Bourne’s Dorian Gray Sadler’s Wells I often wonder whether in a society so greedily obsessed with the commercial acquisition of good looks Dorian...

Peter Phillips A lthough I spend my time working with counterpoint, and know jazz is as capable as any other sort of music at yielding the greatest delight in it, how jazz...

Deborah Ross Pineapple Express 15, Nationwide until, midway through the film, my niece sought me out to ask: ‘Deb, what’s an orgasm?’ Naturally, I sat her down and very calmly...

Lacking colour Michael Tanner Saint Frangois d’Assise Royal Albert Hall A s the climax of the Proms centenary of Messiaen, The Netherlands Opera brought his vast opera Saint...

Kate Chisholm I f you’re able to read this magazine on Saturday in an unchanged world, it’s probably safe to assume that Wednesday’s gigantic experiment with particle physics...

Taki Regensburg T he mighty Danube begins in the park of the Furstenberg Palace and flows eastward for a distance of 2,000 miles across ten countries on to the Black Sea. Last...

Jeremy Clarke I first came across the book Iron John: Man and Masculinity by Robert Bly when I saw it being clutched in the bony old fingers of the man that used to chair...

Melissa Kite A t last, I’m starting to enjoy the downturn. The key was realising that by buying less of everything I’m annoying people in positions of power and calling a lot...

Alex Bilmes says vintage watches have come of age D eep under the Royal Arcade in Mayfair, in a tiny room reached by a death-trap staircase, I’m holding a pretty but, to the...

Jonathan Ray C redit crunch? What credit crunch? The Champagne Bar at St Pancras — at 90 metres, reputedly the longest in Europe — is doing a brisk trade in champagne...

James Sherwood • 1998 Nicolas Feuillatte Palmes d’Or Brut, £75. The Nicolas Feuillatte co-operative makes one of my favourite standby NVs (£17.99 if you buy two at Majestic)...

Charlotte Metcalf W hen Marks & Spencer first began using that treacly voice to advertise food on television, it was a signal to the mass market that ‘just’ any old food was no...

James Delingpole B efore I head off to meet Angus Gibson, I find myself simmering with bitterness and resentment. Gibson is the man you go to see if you want a state-ofthe-art...

STATUS ANXIETY B y the time you read this I may be dead. I have been pressganged into taking part in the London Duathlon this Sunday in order to raise money for the Chelsea and...

The military-backed President Musharraf of Pakistan has been dragged, screaming and kicking, into retirement. He doesn’t know how lucky he is. How power maddens people! In...

Forum, challenging anyone to hold him to account. That’s class. And that, too, is the point. No one became or stayed emperor without blood on his hands. Sheer terror at losing...

R emember the Wightman Cup? For anyone under 40, this was the annual women’s tennis tournament between Britain and the US, which eventually passed away, largely unmourned, at...

pleased that I would no longer be obliged to be polite to his colleague, Bob. Now my husband says the reason he’s so restless at night is that he keeps having hectic...

who asked where, in the absence of a mantelpiece, he should display invitations, you may tell him that many ambassadors without fireplaces use their windowsills. P.W., East...

women who have known each other since college and we plan much of our social calendars around each other. In recent years, however, one of our group has fallen by the wayside...

has a habit of eating with his mouth open. He stops when asked but it is a problem when we have guests to dinner as I am obviously unable to remind him that he is doing it...