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I was in the gym last Tuesday, cycling like a hamster in a wheel, when one of the boxing instructors came up for a chat. “What do you think of Tyson, daktari?” he asked.

We Brits have never been good at coping with heatwaves. How will we cope in thirty years time if this forecast from the UK Meteorological Office is correct?

It began online. I submitted my request for a book and was told to provide “eight working days’ notice” prior to my planned visit. I wasn’t surprised – and pleased when I was given an appointment within a few days. Not many people will want to read about the Maladies et Insectes Nuisibles (Diseases and Insect Pests), part of Auguste Chevalier’s multi-volume treatise on Les Caféièrs du Globe (Coffees of the World), published in the 1940s.

The Trump Ban is still imposed by our Only Connect Editor, even in this year and month, 250 years since the Founding Fathers threw off the British yoke and began their fight for freedom. Would they have done it if they had had even a momentary vision of the 45th and 47th President, our own hard-swearing, humourless, self-adoring Donald, building his golden ballroom?

In fact, I was chary about uploading it into this article. Why? Read on. The image was originally at the top of The Madness of Crowds, an article written by Stoker in July 2024. Then, in May, Vincent Guy asked politely why “a strange bunch of cars” had "parked themselves” across the top of his February 2021 post, How I found out I was Jewish.

There is a word we lack in most languages; a word for the feeling of being exactly where you want to be, doing precisely what you chose, with no gravitational pull toward anywhere else. We have assembled entire vocabularies for its opposite. We have built industries, economies, whole architectures of digital life around its opposite. But the thing itself, that rare, settled sufficiency, that quiet fullness, resists naming, and so resists pursuit.

The UK’s Financial Times could not resist some mild sexual innuendo in the headline of a front-page article in its 30 May edition: “Durex sales deflate as China withdraws condom tax break to revive birth rate.” China announced last December that from January 1 condoms would be subject to a Value Added Tax of 13%, reversing a tax-exemption dating from 1993. Sales of China’s leading condom brand, Durex, owned by British company Reckitt, drooped 5% in the first quarter of 2026.

Most of the early part of my career was spent working for a City tycoon who built up in fifteen years a very significant business. Eventually he judged that it had peaked and agreed its sale. One evening he called me into his properly tycoonish office (view high over the Thames, his own Regency furniture, enough space if needed to address all his loyal employees and simultaneously swing several cats) to discuss a few loose ends; but then got to the point: “Stoker, if you ha

Next time you pass a florist or garden centre in the USA or Europe, stop for a moment and think where those flowers originated. All of them were once wild flowers and were transported to the ‘Western world’ over the last century or two, where they were propagated, selected, bred and multiplied so they could adorn your house or garden.

A decade ago, the term “narrative” rarely appeared outside academic humanities circles in Jordan. It then moved into journalism, often a sign of intellectual seriousness. Today, it has been elevated into a state project, formally embraced by the Jordanian Ministry of Culture. The ambition is wide: to construct a national narrative that stretches back two million years, drawing on prehistoric archaeological findings to anchor the nation’s presence in deep time. Yet this ambiti