Jeremy Harding

It’s hard to think of a culture that doesn’t keep an eye on the weather, yet we imagine it to be a thoroughly British habit. The painters are among the best observers, and Turner the grandest. Shortly before he died he was discovered on the floor of his sickroom in Cheyne Walk, having tried to reach the window and a view of the Thames. His doctor recalled how ‘the sun broke...

Preliminary sketches for the great canvas of the Cold War were already under way in the Balkans in the summer of 1944 when Frank Thompson was executed. Bulgaria was a member of the Axis and Frank, older brother of the historian E.P. Thompson, was on a mission in the country for Special Operations Executive: the idea was that anti-Nazi partisans should be encouraged and supported in their...

There is no hiding place in France for anyone who wants time off from Gérard Depardieu, or Georges, the insidious, attractive fortysomething we remember in Peter Weir’s Green Card (1990). The idea that Depardieu has gone or is going anywhere is endlessly tantalising: he has never been more insistent, more palpably at home or preposterous than he is now, as he promises the French...

Dieback. Four weeks ago the government was contemplating an inferno of ash trees from top to bottom and east to west of the UK. The press were talking up the enemy, Chalara fraxinea, as the mother of all fungi, a Milosevic-Saddam pathogen that had to be stopped in its tracks. The trouble was that no one knew how to target the offender. The next thought, it followed, was that we should eliminate all infected trees, not just saplings imported from Europe but mature ash in British forests. Maybe even healthy trees near infected ones: deny the predator the prey.

‘We are fighting a losing battle,’ Philip Hensher writes in The Missing Ink, his funny, exasperated book in defence of handwriting.* He has no difficulty spotting the enemy. Consider the advice from the Indiana Department of Education last year that only proficiency with a keyboard would be expected of pupils in its charge. (Schools ‘can continue to teach handwriting if they...