Society

A work outing to Venice. Sweetpea (yes, her real name) has captained my ship, run my life, steered me from countless disasters for 15 years and she deserved a decent break. Luckily two of my oldest friends have an apartment in the city. Our first supper at Corte Sconta in the authentic Castello district was sensational. Mixed grilled fish of the day, gleaming artichokes. No showiness, just exquisite food. We scored again for lunch next day outside in the sunshine on Campo Santo Stefano. Trust me to break the magic by booking us a Saturday night table at Harry’s Bar. We had to settle for 7 p.m. and then in an inner

In a statement, the Prince of Wales says he ‘refuses to give up’ on ‘a brighter future for the Middle East’. Nobody thought he had given up, so why did he feel the need to say it? His Churchillian reference to ‘the darkest hour’ does not work. In 1940 the darkest hour was for Britain against Nazi Germany. Now it is for Israel, attacked by fanatical anti-Semites. Churchill did not call for ‘permanent peace’ but to fight back. Although Prince William mentions the plight of the hostages as well as Gazans’ need for aid, the objective effect of his intervention (if any) is to make life harder for Israel. Israel,

What sent the economy into recession at the end of last year? The government blames higher interest rates, ushered in by the Bank of England. The Bank in turn points the finger at shocks such as Russia’s war against Ukraine. Both are plausible answers – and certainly part of the equation. But the Office for National Statistics has offered up another explanation, one that the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will be grappling with as he prepares for the Budget in two weeks’ time: mass worklessness. ‘If more people were in work, consuming, producing,’ said ONS chief economist Grant Fitzner when the recession was announced, ‘we would have higher GDP numbers.’ Those

Though I believe that people who use the phrase ‘retail therapy’ should probably have their voting rights removed, I do like shops – the lights and the people and the chatter. My mum was a shopgirl for much of her life and the only other job I’ve had apart from being a writer was as a teenage runaway shopgirl, selling scent in a chemist’s at King’s Cross station. I’ve never done an ‘online shop’ in my life. Though I can see that they’re useful to the sick and the immobile and those with large families, I don’t want to live in an atomised world where everything is done alone, sitting down –

The explosion of hatred and extremism prompted by the October 7 massacre was never going to limit itself to the Jewish state. Even as early reports were filtering in, the news that Palestinian terrorists had infiltrated Israel and slaughtered its citizens appeared to kickstart a dynamo of Jew-hatred in the West. Since then, we have had only news reports and anecdotes to go on, but the trends were evident. Now we have the numbers. A report from the Community Security Trust (CST) finds there were more antisemitic incidents in the UK over the past 12 months than in any previous year, with October 7 pinpointed as the most significant factor.

The question of whether lockdowns caused more problems than they solved will be picked over for years to come, even if the official Covid-19 inquiry shows little interest in peering into the matter. The latest contribution, a paper from Lund University in Sweden, provides further evidence that this really is something that a UK inquiry needs to investigate. The paper, published by the Institute for Economic Affairs, seeks correlations between the severity of lockdown restrictions in 25 European OECD members and outcomes in terms of excess deaths, economic growth and public deficits. It seems to provide a fairly clear answer: lockdowns were associated with higher overall levels of excess deaths, poorer

Lord Byron’s daughter Lady Ada Lovelace is almost as famous now as her father. An entire industry has sprung up around her. There are Ada books, films, T-shirts, toys, games, and even a programming language named after her. Astonishingly, she has a four-page entry in the Dictionary of 19th Century Science British Scientists. The book gives her the same amount of space as George Boole and Augustus de Morgan, and not much less than Karl Pearson, who established the discipline of mathematical statistics. Like them, Ada is called a ‘mathematician’. Yet there is no evidence that she obtained any novel mathematical results. She left no published mathematical papers. Nor are there manuscripts