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Scylla and Charybdis are said to have sat off the Sicilian coast, where Mike Lynch’s boat foundered, and where 3,200 years before, Odysseus navigated between the monster and the whirlpool. Many think of the Med as a gentle sea, more like an oversized eternity pool, unbothered by the killer storms and cliff-high waves that rage beyond Gibraltar. The howling wind had ripped along the coast, whisking the beach away overnight I thought that, too, before I was bashed up by wild tempests in the two years I criss-crossed the Mediterranean in Odysseus’s wake. One morning, I turned up at a hotel on Mykonos. As I made my way to the

Two photos from the youth of Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance have recently surfaced and are filling his opponents with glee. In one of them, he’s dressed as a woman, with shoulder-length golden hair, a look of yet-to-be-plucked wistfulness, and three days of teenage stubble. The other shows him loitering in a men’s bathroom, a faint aura of The Munsters about him, as three smiling young women (fellow members of his Ohio school’s student government) pretend to relieve themselves standing up into a row of urinals. Along with his views on abortion (at the battier end, admittedly, of the pro-life movement) and his strong take on women’s role within the

The new Premiership season kicked off this weekend and, with all the usual hype, will come novelties. There are the gamely optimistic new arrivals and returnees, no doubt a breakout star or two, some eyebrow-raising new hairstyles (Mo Salah) and some ingeniously tweaked – and therefore ‘must-have’ – revenue-gouging strips. As ever, there will be new rules, including yet further tinkering with VAR. But what interests me, as an English teacher and student of socio-linguistics, will be any novelties in the figurative language which the players, fans and journalists use to describe the game. Over nearly 50 years of watching football, it has been fascinating to hear the football lexicon

As an arts journalist, you know you’re getting old when you scan the Edinburgh Festival programme, and instead of thinking ‘Wow, look at all this,’ your reaction is ‘Oh Christ, look at all that’. You tell friends that you’re off to cover Edinburgh in August, and instead of lighting up with envy, they suck their teeth in sympathy. Ouch – nasty! And yet there it is, nonetheless: that great immovable cultural blow-out on the shores of the Forth; infinite, monstrous, plastered all over press and media, and defying you to ignore it. Could you design a less suitable host city for a major international arts festival? No, it’s got to

The Guild Chapel in Stratford-upon-Avon presents its congregation with a vision of terror: a medieval Doom painting depicting the Day of Judgment. On the left are those who have behaved themselves – the Saved – who joyously bound towards the gates of Paradise. On the right, sinners pay the price for falling short of the moral mark: they are tortured by demons and fed into the Mouth of Hell, to be swallowed by a fanged serpent. This summer, another Day of Judgment looms. Yesterday, thousands of UK 18-year-olds will receive their A-Level exam results. In one nervous scroll, years of schoolwork was validated, university places confirmed or denied, and future