When the Observer reviewed Leonard Cohen’s posthumous 2018 book of Poetry, The Flame, they called it ‘the last word in love and despair’,...

At 91, Ennio Morricone was too young to die. The veteran composer of, amongst other things, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and The...

‘Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine’, said Henry David Thoreau. He said lots more about civil disobedience, but just...

If a satellite, or a Martian, transited high above my village right now, it might capture as an image a large and unearthly, rectangular...

My favourite moment in 2018 came at about 10.24 p.m on 31stMarch. In fact, for a year, I kept going back onto Youtube to make sure that...

‘Life is all memory,’ said Tennessee Williams, ‘except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.’...

To belong to a tribe, you have first to understand its rituals. Here in Britain, for example, you need to understand that the question...

‘We are what we repeatedly do,’ said Aristotle to no one in particular. ‘Excellence is not an act, but a habit’. Aristotle may have been...

I think we can agree it was sub-optimal. Cricket is a statistical game for statistically minded people and, by any measure, the raw stats...

No one actually buys a filing cabinet. Filing cabinets just appear in your house one day and, like that annoying Patek Philippe...

My bees are bloody freezing. It’s that time of year when you don’t even dare to open the top of the hive to see if they’ve got enough to...

I don’t really drop names, but only because I have so few to drop. If you only have a couple, you tend to take extra care of them....

Loss cuts many ways. When our lovely friend and club wicket keeper died seven years ago, a small group of us sat in the Queen’s Head in...