The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Don’t expect the cyclone in Burma to have benign political side-effects

Rod Liddle says that there is a natural hope that the interventions of the UN and charities in the disaster-stricken country will open it up. But history does not support such optimism

The hard choices that face the Father of the Mayor

Stanley Johnson is adjusting to his new constitutional position in the life of London: not least deciding which clubs to avoid at lunchtime in order to dodge Boris’s journalist foes

Our transport system is not even ‘Third World’

Andrew Neil offers a despairing snapshot of cancelled trains, ludicrously expensive rail tickets, hell at Terminal 5, non-existent customer service. Does anyone want to fix this?

‘It’s harder for straights to feel Christian charity than gays’

Theo Hobson meets Gene Robinson, the only openly gay Anglican bishop, who says that homosexuals are more open to the Christian ‘message of radical change’

London Notebook

Barry Humphries on life in the capital

Were we any better than the Nazis?

Sam Leith on Nicholson Baker's new account of World War 2

Hands off Jerusalem, my family heirloom

George Bridges on the part played by his great-grandfather, Robert Bridges, in the composition of Parry’s music to Blake’s lyric: too precious, he says, to be hijacked by separatists

Of vice and men

Taki lives the High Life

Rural poor

Aidan Hartley on the Wild Life

Never on Sunday

Taki lives the High Life