‘Whatever else you do, don’t step backwards,’ a man in the crowd shouts to Rishi Sunak as he stands on the edge of a swimming pool in the garden of a Tory councillor’s home in Bushey, Hertfordshire. About 100 party members have gathered to hear Sunak’s pitch. It’s the first of three stops he’s making
I do not doubt that hot weather occasioned by climate change is the primary cause of the many wildfires we have seen in the UK this summer. But I wonder if they have also become more profuse as a consequence of various authorities desperately attempting to make the countryside more ‘accessible’ to people who, in
It glows. The whole painting glows. Glows not just with the way the light from a fire unseen beyond the artist’s frame reflects in his glistening eyes; reflects in the moist redness of his almost girlish lips; reflects in the folds of his turban and silky grey sash. It glows too from an inner radiation,
This is a bleak version of looking on the bright side, but what’s astonishing about last week’s vicious stabbing in upstate New York is that such an attack didn’t occur decades ago. However sickeningly incapacitated at present, Salman Rushdie himself would doubtless agree. Having survived unharmed for 33 years under a death sentence – endorsed
How outraged should we be that Saudi Aramco has reported a world-record quarterly profit of $48 billion, representing a giant bonus from the global oil price spike provoked by the war in Ukraine? Well, that’s how the cookie crumbles when you’re sitting on oil reserves so abundant and so easily accessible that your marginal cost
