Few British traditions can claim as long a history as racing. The first races thought to have taken place in these islands were organised by Roman soldiers encamped in Yorkshire, pitting English horses against Arabian. By the 900s, King Athelstan was placing an export ban on English horses due to their superiority over their continental
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, joined President Volodymyr Zelensky and the leaders of France, Germany, Italy, Finland, the EU and Nato in a visit to Washington three days after the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska. On his return he chaired a virtual meeting of a ‘coalition of the willing’ to discuss security guarantees for
I am entombed, like Edgar Allan Poe’s prematurely buried man, listening through headphones to a contemporary Russian fugue for organ and bagpipes. I had asked for a soothing Schubert prelude, but the radiologist couldn’t lay hands on one. The headphones have no volume control I can locate – only on and off, and off will
‘Proscription’ appears to be the current word of the month. But what does it mean? The Latin scribo means ‘I write’ and generates a root in script-. Since the Latin prefix pro carried the idea of ‘bringing something into the open’, the noun proscriptio meant ‘a written notice announcing a sale’. In the 1st century
Suit cases Volodymyr Zelensky again failed to wear a suit and tie to a meeting at the White House, in spite of being asked to do so – although Donald Trump did say he looked ‘fabulous’ in his black button-up suit. What did Allied leaders wear to the great conferences in the second world war?
Fighting dirty Sir: John Power is very interesting (‘Dark matter’, 16 August) when outlining the ‘dark arts’ being proposed by Labour to counter the political threat of Nigel Farage and Reform. This is nothing new of course, with one of the most divisive examples being during the Batley and Spen by-election in 2021, when Keir
