Fraud
Deception by stealth: the scammer’s long game
Swindled out of almost $100,000, Johnathan Walton warns of the insidious strategies lasting years of the really determined con artist
A marriage of inconvenience: The Bride Stone, by Sally Gardner, reviewed
His capricious father’s will leaves a young English doctor needing to find a wife within two days and seven hours of his return home from revolutionary France
Alzheimer’s research is challenging enough without a data manipulation scandal
Two cases of scientific fraud and cover-up are brought to light by Charles Piller, with serious consequences for the Alzheimer’s field in the US
Magnetic and manipulative – the enigma of Gala Dali
Countless people apparently found her fascinating, but apart from being shrewd, scary, intelligent and very beady about money, it’s hard to see why
The crude tirades of Cicero the demagogue
Far from being a crusader for virtue, the Roman statesman is seen as a violent firebrand, disregarding the law when it suited him and laying the groundwork for Julius Caesar’s assassination
Conning the booktrade connoisseurs
Fuelled by loathing and resentment, Thomas James Wise set about defrauding as many privileged bibliophiles as he could – only to be rumbled by two of their number
The lady vanishes
This is a depressing book. It’s a reminder of everything that is sick, broken and generally maledicted about the human…
Letters
Don’t ban Russia’s culture Sir: It is uncouth, illiterate and actually beneficial to Putin when theatres, opera houses and other…
Daylight robbery
Why won’t banks help fraud victims like my daughter?
The fall guy
Tom Hayes, Libor and a miscarriage of justice
The great pretender
It’s 1993 and you’re studying at a top agricultural college with a bright future ahead of you, perhaps in farming…
Tough old world
Like a basking shark, Val McDermid once remarked, a crime series needs to keep moving or die. The same could…
An isolated misfit
Why did W.G. Sebald risk his reputation by telling such strange, repeated lies, wonders Lucasta Miller
The man who wasn’t there
Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974
Barometer
Last orders The new tier restrictions have made life difficult for pubs. How many are closed? — According to the…
Beggaring belief
Eight centuries ago in Turkey, at a gathering of intellectuals, a Muslim sultan insisted that one of his courtiers write…
The government isn’t taking the risk of contact tracing fraud seriously
Experts have a get-out clause of which politicians can only dream when they are speaking from the podium at press briefings.…
Why does someone keep sending me furniture?
When a new vacuum cleaner was delivered to my house last week I assumed it was a belated birthday present…
Internet scammers can fool anyone – including me
Please don’t suppose I’m unaware I’ve been an idiot. I recount what happened to me last week without expecting your…
TalkTalk shows us the internet is only three clicks from anarchy
I’m not a customer of TalkTalk, the phone company which revealed last week that a hacker had potentially compromised the…
A new track record
Simon Bradley dates the demise of the on-board meal service to 1962, when Pullman services no longer offered croutons with…
Redefining aid
In this week’s Queen’s Speech, the government promised as usual to cut red tape for businesses. But David Cameron is…
Benefits for people who don’t live here? Great idea
Yet another exciting discovery from the world of Islamic science. As you are probably aware, Islamic culture has always paid…
Muck and brass
The whole idea of capitalism, according to Enlightenment philosophers, was that it created a positive spiral of moral behaviour. ‘Concern…
It’ll be game over for all of us if the cyber crimewave continues to advance
‘The internet is broken,’ a corporate chieftain told me last week. It was an arresting remark, but he did not…
