How to banish the scary jihadi monsters
Saturday evening in Durham. My in-laws and I had just begun our usual postprandial shout about Donald Trump when my…
Why are district nurses quitting in droves? Because they care too much
Sometimes, on Sundays, I visit Richard, a friend who’s 95 and lives alone. The idea originally was that I’d be…
Henry Marsh: How doctors can become monsters
The celebrated neurosurgeon Henry Marsh on saving lives and facing death
The gang in our park have united us... in impotence
The baby, unbothered by diesel fumes, enjoys an outing down the main road through London N1. Each passing bus is…
The mad, bad crusade against 'cultural appropriation'
It’s usually best to ignore the indignant fury of the 21st-century young. We’re used to them now, these snowflakes, posing…
A new Ripper mystery: Why Patricia Cornwell won't stop hunting him
Why has crime writer Patricia Cornwell spent two decades and $6 million hunting Victorian London’s most notorious killer?
What will you do in the gene-editing revolution?
The only time I ever saw a wolf in the wild, a small one, I was so frightened that I…
Why wouldn’t our NHS saints help a dying man?
We all think pretty highly of ourselves these days, free from old-fashioned ideas about sin. We’re good people. And yet……
‘You’re very calm,’ said the cabbie. I wondered how much danger I was in
I meant to get the bus, but by the time I arrived at the stop at 5 p.m. last Tuesday, I…
Why I’m telling my son about the sky fairy
After we were married, my husband and I went on honeymoon to Mexico. We drove across country east to west,…
How to become a successful cult leader: offer love, and then withdraw it
When I was 22 I met a man called Yisrayl Hawkins who said his coming had been prophesied in the…
My husband’s affair with Michael Gove, and other things that didn’t happen
A few weeks ago I discovered that while he should have been focused on the fight of his life during…
Just how clever are ravens? I asked at the Tower of London
On Tower Hill, by the east wall of Beauchamp Tower where Robert Dudley was imprisoned for a year, a raven…
Fear of seeming racist is enabling female genital mutilation
Do you remember Alan Kurdi, the poor, drowned three-year-old whose photograph provoked a wave of sympathy for migrants almost exactly…
The Boris-bashers should be ashamed
Throughout this fractious summer, one thing has united all the warring pundits and politicians. Left, right; Leave, Remain, everyone at…
How playing Pokémon Go nearly made me lose my mind
Monday morning: one hand trapped beneath the fat and guzzling midget, with the other I idly opened the gates of…
What’s to blame for a generation of desperation?
Youth is wasted on the young, for the most part, and thank God for that. There’s nothing grislier than a…
The day that Brexit camped in my kitchen
On Thursday last week, as the baby and I were moving in our usual slow circles around the house, from…
Stop lecturing fatties – it’s really not their fault
I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though…
Why is Obama so obsessed with transgender toilet rights?
Who’d have thought that one of Obama’s last great battles would be over toilets? Last week he issued a strict…
I used to back Jeremy Hunt’s digital NHS plan. Now I know it’s a disaster
My baby and I excel at blood tests. He (tiny, jaundiced) stretches out naked under the hospital’s hot cot-lamps like…
The scan said my baby wouldn’t live. It was wrong
When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence…
The sad decline of the teenage snog
Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…
I, robot. You, unemployed
One evening last autumn, four experts in the field of artificial intelligence arrived in Westminster with an urgent message for…
Am I a brave cult survivor, too?
When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group…
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