Society

One of the more surprising attractions of Wellington, New Zealand’s small but perfectly formed capital city, is what might be described as England’s farthest-flung literary shrine — the Katherine Mansfield House. The author’s birthplace and childhood home, this modest house in the relatively plush suburb of Thorndon is open to the public — and who could resist the allure of a building described by Mansfield as ‘that awful cubbyhole’, ‘the wretched letter box in town’ and ‘that horrid little piggy house which was really dreadful’? She also described the place as ‘dark and crowded’. Dark it still is, and horribly crowded it must have been. In the five years the

How do you go about choosing a pension plan? For many of us – especially if you are part of a workplace pension – it’s something you tend to just accept. Bearing that in mind, the recent research done by Portafina into the response times of various different pension providers might make you think twice about simply accepting whichever pension scheme comes your way. While the most responsive Defined Contribution pension providers took a relatively short time to provide basic information needed to advise clients ­(just over a week), the worst performing schemes took over five weeks to provide similar information. When it comes to Defined Benefit (Final Salary) schemes, the

Not even twenty minutes had passed into the discussion between guest speakers Carl Benjamin and Yaron Brook at King’s College London before free speech was suppressed. Swarms of violent protestors stormed the lecture theatre, with masks and bandanas, hurling verbal abuse and inciting physical attacks. We were faced with a chilling demonstration of contemporary fascism. I was chairing the discussion, at King’s College London, ironically devoted to free speech and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. The speakers had different angles, and the audience were invited to make up their own mind. Although for some, rational debate was not the aim. A large bang announced their arrival. Around thirty came through the back

It was always going to be difficult for this year’s Oscars to balance politics and entertainment, the sweeping declaration with the plunging cleavage. The host, Jimmy Kimmel, got through his opening routine well enough, and without showing his cleavage either, but the strain was already showing. The décor and the script were like a moral split-screen. We were told to celebrate ninety years of the Oscars, while disapproving of nine decades of exploitation and sleaze, some of it practised by people sitting in the audience at the Dolby Theater. What we got was easy jokes about Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump, and pompous announcements that it was time to send

This week my daughter, 11, got the equivalent of a whopping scratch card win in the lottery of life; she got into the secondary school of her choice, an outcome partly determined by her being a Catholic, partly by dint of her entirely fortuitous proximity to the school in question. Some of her classmates are also going around punching the air, others, also baptised, aren’t, presumably on the basis that they didn’t live close enough. They’re a bit subdued right now, poor mites; at the age of eleven, they’ve got the sense that things haven’t really worked out for them, unless quite a few of the lucky ones turn down