HOWZAT

Why is the Royal Mail blocking a moving memorial?

Steve McQueen’s stamps make an eloquent tribute to our war dead. It's time the Royal Mail issued them

Olympic hopes and dreams from the waterside

Talking to people up and down the country, I am struck by how much the Games is still seen as belonging to London alone

Sound the last post. A fat lot Mandy cares

Cut the lifeline provided by Royal Mail and you snap yet another of the frayed threads that are holding Britain together

Richard Morrison on British opera

In the great age of opera why couldn’t the British compete? Well, perhaps we did

Cupboard love: the secret life of things

A special aura: inanimate objects do exert an influence over us that goes far beyond the immediately understandable

You have a long life - make the most of it

Imagine being born the day that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and living long enough to use the internet

Staggering and lasting beauty from a dark age

Archaeology is at its most gripping when it uncovers tantalising enigmas for which there is no rational explanation

Volunteers in the arts

Let’s salute the unpaid volunteer: in the arts world they are vital

A reverence for the Age of New Simplicity

We seem dissatisfied with the tame passivity of life. We shop till we drop, but can’t get no satisfaction

Richard Morrison on the underhand plan to infest Britain with wind farms

A new quango may bring the biggest change to rural Britain of our lives

With its jaded japes, the Last Night of the Proms is a national embarrassment

The Last Night has no connection with the superb eight-week music festival that precedes it. Worse, it has no connection with the 21st century

An act of creation that had me in tears

You felt as if you were receiving the wisdom of not one great musical veteran, but two — communing across the centuries

Edinburgh Scots and their one-track minds

In a few years, at tremendous cost, Edinburgh will be equipped with the latest 19th-century transport technology

Whatever you cook up, it pays to use your loaf. . .

A cannier impresario wouldn’t have outlined the intellectual limitations of his target audience three days before his festival started

The world as it was — one century ago

Did journalists of the Edwardian era sigh as the silly season approached and prepare their dispatches on the beast of Bodmin?

Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . .

Isn’t it odd how often modern biographers disover an unexpected and invariably ugly side to a revered hero

A liberal view that to me seems suicidal

Saying that assisted suicide is OK is some circumstances is a recipe for chaos, hypocrisy and tragedy on a mass scale