The Week

Leading article

How Rishi Sunak should react to the Ely riot

‘There’s a lot of societal issues in Ely,’ said an anonymous caller to BBC Radio Wales the morning after the recent riots in that Cardiff suburb. ‘Motorbikes going up and down constantly. Open drug-dealing going on in broad daylight, that the police are aware of, and nothing gets done about it. Children in Ely –

Portrait of the week

Diary

My lunch with Salman Rushdie

I have just come back from spending some days with David Hockney at his house in Normandy. We are making a film about him – the longest film about a single subject I have ever attempted. Like Monet’s, Hockney’s environment is his subject. The great sequence of ‘The Four Seasons’ is from his grounds. He

Ancient and modern

The lessons of ancient Rome’s dangerous doctors

Last week’s column ended with a Roman funerary inscription: ‘I died of a surfeit of doctors.’ But where did this surfeit come from? Let Pliny the Elder (d. ad 79) explain. Pliny devoted book 29 of his Natural History (a vast encyclopedia of Roman life) to the history of medicine. Claiming that no discipline ‘undergoes

Barometer

Do speeding fines work?

Fine lines Would Suella Braverman be more likely to stick to the speed limit had she chosen to go on a speed awareness course instead of being fined? A government-commissioned study in 2018 looked at the reoffending rate among 1.4 million drivers who had accepted the offer of a speed awareness course and compared it

Letters

Letters: Britain’s net-zero ambition problem

Zero ambition Sir: How extraordinary that Ross Clark (‘Carbon fixation’, 20 May) can look at the cut-throat competition to capture the economic gains of the future and conclude that Britain’s problem is an excess of ambition. The USA stands alone as the only G7 nation not to have a net-zero target in law, but is