Comment & Opinion

Jon Snow on London's treescape: ‘The environment should be the backdrop to everything we do’

The Channel 4 news presenter and tree champion on how he woke up to climate change.

Jason Goodwin: ‘Sow is one of the mildest sweetest pigs ever. Boar is bigger, a gentleman and a scholar.'

Jason Goodwin muses over whether it's his moral duty to begin to keep pigs again, given the pork shortage soon to shake the globe.

The CLA president on why private landowners are part of the climate-change solution

Jason Goodwin: 'We have dropped the UFOs and the phantom social workers, just as we once dropped the fairies'

Our spectator columnist comments on the decline of UFO sightings.

Curious Questions: Why do we have Advent calendars?

The first three-and-a-half weeks of December can mean only one thing: people anxiously opening small cardboard doors in order to behold the wonders within. But how did the Advent calendar phenomenon start? Martin Fone investigates.

Jason Goodwin: The second, little-known verse of our National Anthem

Our spectator columnist comments on this past Remembrance Sunday.

HRH The Prince of Wales: 'We urgently need a fresh, positive and practical vision for the countryside'

In his birthday message, The Prince of Wales applauds efforts to combat climate change and acknowledges the urgent need to explain the value of the food our farmers produce.

Jason Goodwin: 'Politicians need historians as much as kings need minstrels'

Jason Goodwin undertakes a family cycle ride along the Danube.

39 things a gentleman simply must do before he dies

We’ll all end up on our deathbeds eventually, but it would be nice to make it there with no regrets.

Curious Questions: How likely are you to be killed by a falling coconut?

Our resident curious questioner Martin Fone poses (and answers) another head scratcher - or should we say, head banger?

Jason Goodwin: 'In those days, the French government seemed to use sugar wrappers to effect social change'

Jason Goodwin speaks of collections – from stamps and bus tickets to sugar packets and mushrooms.

Curious Questions: Should animals wear clothes?

Martin Fone, decidedly not an animal person, ponders whether animals should wear clothes and, indeed, what a stylish pet would wear in the case that they do.

Jason Goodwin: 'Insofar as anything made of stainless steel can be considered a member of the family, I loved that pan like a brother'

Our spectator columnist Jason Goodwin dons his cape and ventures off to save the planet, one lifetime guarantee frying pan at a time.

Jason Goodwin: 'In Yorkshire he spat on them, down south he peed, either way, they aren’t good eating'

Jason Goodwin: 'Coleridge never stopped talking... Wordsworth was more private, more reflective, and finally, more successful'

Jason Goodwin remarks on how tracking one's pet past the boundaries of one's home is comparable to Coleridge's 'This Lime-tree Bower My Prison'.

Curious Questions: Has there ever been a more disturbing time in British politics?

We're constantly being told that the division, anger and uncertainty we're currently witnessing in British politics is 'unprecedented'. But insanity, strife and hare-brained scheming are nothing new at Westminster — and things have often been far worse. Jacqueline Riding looks at an example from 200 years ago which serves as a chilling warning that we must all help to stop things from escalating still further.

Love in the Countryside's rocky road to rural romance: Sheep-herding tests, awkward cider farm dates and being dumped by a Shetland pony

Forget Tinder, BBC Two's Love in the Countryside is the farmer's answer to cupid. Rachael Turner reports.

Jason Goodwin: 'All he had to do is walk along the same street in his mind and sing out the objects as they cropped up'

Curious Questions: Dirty cash, filthy lucre... but how mucky is our money?

Martin Fone ponders another Curious Question, and comes away thinking that perhaps it's time for us to start money laundering in a very literal sense.

Jason Goodwin: The unbeatable 10-minute, £10 haircut — and who cares what it looks like at the end?

More speed, less fuss. What more could you ask for from a barber, asks Jason Goodwin.