Yorkshire
This Muslim playwright believes Yorkshire is headed for civil war
Expendable, at the Royal Court, is an urgent bulletin from the front line of the grooming gang scandal in the…
Fear and gloaming at Whitby Goth Weekend
Every April and every Halloween weekend, Whitby in Yorkshire is chock-full of goths. As I seem to be The Spectator’s…
The bald truth about Patrick Stewart
The actor best known for his role as Star Trek’s Captain Picard comes across as pompous, chippy and point-scoring as he reminisces about directors and fellow stars
The give and take of friendship
Claudia FitzHerbert explores the complex bond between two remarkable writers in the interwar years
The cowboy and the cop
Detective Inspector Jim Stringer is back. This is a York novel, or rather a Yorkshire crime novel. The LNER railway…
Northern noir
It is winter in north Yorkshire. On the brink of New Year, Jake, a laconic, isolated former farmhand in his…
HS2’s completion is as likely as King Harry’s coronation
Seven years ago, when HS2 was still officially costed at £33 billion, I wrote that I was looking forward to…
Our flood defences aren’t fit for the climate we have now
This week’s political fuss over whether the floods in Yorkshire constitute a ‘national emergency’ misses the point. It is too…
Inside the unassuming house where the Brontës’ creativity thrived
‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?’ Jane Eyre asks Mr…
Whitby Abbey is at the heart of Britain’s spiritual and literary history
The 199 steps up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey are a pilgrimage; they always have been. And any good…
The Yorkshire town that’s gone from dirty old buildings to New Age nirvana
Bernard Ingham once told a story about a reporter from the Financial Times who went to cover an election in…
The turf
I guess his mother may have called him Patrick, or even, when he was in trouble, ‘Patrick Joseph’, but in…
Tragedy trumped by porn
Big fuss about Cleansed at the Dorfman. Talk of nauseous punters rushing for the gangways may have perversely delighted the…
Radio is flowering because it’s so much more potent than TV
Who would have thought in this visually obsessed age of YouTube, selfies and Instagram that radio, pure audio, no images…
Diary
My Cambodian daughter and her husband have just got married again. Wedding One was a Buddhist affair in our drawing…
Contagion of a different kind as Greece wriggles off the hook
The clear winner in the Greek crisis is the author of The Little Book of Negotiating Clichés, whose royalties must…
Which behaved worse: callous Thomas Cook or cynical Barclays?
Which is worse, morally and reputationally — to be Thomas Cook, shamed by its refusal to show proper human concern,…
Can the new Northern Powerhouse supremo make Leeds and Manchester work together?
A doff of my flat cap to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who has been made a peer,…
Ghost town
BBC1’s authentically spooky three-part ghost story Remember Me hasn’t yet revealed what’s really going on in that gloomy Yorkshire town.…
A vintner’s vocation
A delightful girl came to see me this morning. She is helping with the research for a biography of David…
The greatest living Yorkshireman
After 13 barren years Yorkshire is back at the top of county cricket, where Geoffrey Boycott believes it has a…
A Cubist in New York
The American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) was born in Belostok in Russia (now Bialystok in Poland), and although he…
North star
There are festivals of everything, everywhere. So why get excited about the Ryedale Festival (11–27 July) apart from the fact…
The naughty Methodist is a comic sideshow: it was professionals who ruined the Co-op
The naughty Reverend Flowers will be a comic footnote in the history of the financial crisis — but no more…
