There are plenty of reasons to visit Catania in Sicily, and some of them are positive. The town is impressively ancient – dating back to the 8th century bc. It boasts a handsome, lavishly voluted Baroque core. A few steps from that main piazza you can find the picturesque fish market, the Pescheria, which sequins the
On Remembrance Sunday, former prime ministers are given ceremonial roles. When everyone assembled last weekend, it was a reminder of the recent mayhem within the Tory party. Labour’s 13-year era seemed neat by comparison: Tony Blair, then Gordon Brown. The Tories’ 13 years in power were represented by a more chaotic line-up: David Cameron, Theresa
Kigali The Supreme Court’s ruling that sending migrants to a former hostel in Kigali is illegal strikes another hammer blow to the government, not least because Rwanda gets to keep the £140 million that set up the proposed deal in the first place. Never mind what happens now – and this story is far
Southern Lebanon In the week following the 7/10 attacks by Hamas, a journalist in Beirut put the question all of Lebanon wanted to ask to the Prime Minister, Najib Mikati: do we have to be dragged into the war with Israel? It was more of a cri de coeur than a question, because the whole
‘Happy New Year! The year of our victory!’ said Volodymyr Zelensky on 1 January. After the liberation of the Kharkiv region and Kherson, Ukrainians entered the ninth year of the war with hope that they could win. Light will always prevail over darkness, Zelensky likes to say. But now the counter-offensive is nearly over, having
Armistice Day is meant to be a moment of solemn national unity. Yet this year it is expected to coincide with the rather less harmonious ‘Million March for Palestine’, as hundreds of thousands gather in central London on Saturday to protest against Israel’s war on Gaza. Are these events compatible? Should the protest be banned?
Two stories are emerging from the Covid Inquiry: one that it wants to tell and one that it does not. The first is a tale of foul-mouthed incompetence, of which there’s no shortage of evidence dredged from the private messages of the main actors. The more important story can be found in the submitted statements
Jerusalem On Tuesday, I was driving down to an Israeli army headquarters on the border with Gaza as a massive convoy of police cars and black bullet-proof limousines forced me onto the side of the road by the town of Ofakim. In Israel, only one man travels in a convoy that large. It was 7
Away from Gaza, things are getting worse in the West Bank. I’ve received many messages from Palestinian friends raging at what is going on there. To get an idea of the despair of West Bank Palestinians, remember the suicidal attacks on the streets of Jerusalem a decade or so ago. Usually what happened was an
Stephen Fry is a national treasure whom half the nation can’t stand. He drops his façade of loveability mid-chortle as soon as Brexit is mentioned. He threw a spectacularly pompous Remainer wobbly a few weeks ago and I remember thinking: is he determined to make the people he disdains actively hate him? If so, it’s
I was invited to speak at the memorial service for my colleague and friend, Professor Doris Enright-Clark Shoukri, at the American University in Cairo. It was to be held at the downtown Cairo campus, overlooking Tahrir Square. Doris had worked as a professor of English literature at the university from 1955 to 2017. The same
Cockney is dead, but so is the King’s English. Long live Standard Southern British English. The Cockney Barbara Windsor yelling ‘Ge’ aah-a my pub’ is as fossilised as Eliza Doolittle. And what a shock it is today to hear the late Queen, aged 21, declare: ‘My whole life whether it be long or short shall
Every year I lay a wreath a week early, because Blyth, my nearest town, was a submarine port. Submariners were banned from the first Armistice Day parade in Whitehall by a bossy admiral on the grounds that they were pirates who targeted civilians. In response they adopted skull-and-crossbones badges and arranged their own celebrations on
This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40 years of going on about Firbank, that not everyone who sees it will have heard of him. He falls into that intriguing and important category of blue-plaque subjects who are not household names, but whose
There’s a online blacklist of men you should avoid dating and I’m on it. I discovered this over the summer when a colleague gave me a nudge and showed me a screenshot of my dating profile. ‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ A wave of fear passed through me. I had been posted on a Facebook group
What is the point of the Covid Inquiry? It should be to establish which parts of the government’s pandemic response worked, which parts didn’t, and what to do next time. Instead, it is a farce – a spectacle of hysteria, name-calling and trivialities. The stakes could hardly be higher. Lockdown was the most disruptive policy
After three weeks of airstrikes, Israel has begun its ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. The goal, in the words of the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, is to ‘wipe them [Hamas] off the face of the Earth’. But without a long-term political vision, this objective is unachievable. Even if Israel deals a powerful blow against
John Cleese enjoys tough questions. He’s currently touring America with An Evening with the Late John Cleese, and a substantial part of the show is thrown open to the audience. He tells me that when someone asks a particularly rude question – such as ‘Why can’t you stay married?’ – it simply adds to the
Israel has made the first, rather tentative, moves of its ground operation against Hamas – but there’s nothing tentative about its aerial bombing. Here’s a report of one incident: at 4.30 p.m. on 10 October, an explosion collapsed a six-storey building in Sheikh Radwan, a district of Gaza City, killing, it was said, at least 40
Something strange is happening with teenagers’ mental health. In Britain, the US, Australia and beyond, the same trend can be seen: around the middle of the last decade, the number of young people with anxiety, depression and even suicidal tendancies started to rise sharply. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at New York University’s Stern School