Simon Barnes

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Friday 29 July 2022
The pangolin bites back
Mankind’s abuse of this little mammal may have brought us some rough justice, writes Simon Barnes
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Tuesday 8 March 2022
The magician
Shane Warne’s powers over cricket balls and players transcended sport
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Wednesday 2 February 2022
Back where we started
James Joyce’s Ulysses is 100 years old. It is still long and difficult but, Simon Barnes says, it must be read
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Friday 17 December 2021
Let there be night
The days grow short. The winter solstice is upon us. Simon Barnes traces the history of light and squints anxiously into our bright future
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Tuesday 23 November 2021
Hunting the blues
Human action, or inaction, is helping blue whales recover. Our treatment of our biggest neighbour is hugely symbolic
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Monday 8 November 2021
The government’s approach to sewage – and Britain’s rivers – is full of shit
There are good, natural reasons why flooding rivers and the sea with sewage is a terrible idea. It’s also deeply unpopular
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Tuesday 26 October 2021
Be nice to bats this Halloween
These wondrous flying mammals have had a bad rap, thanks in no small part to Bram Stoker. They deserve our friendship
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Tuesday 12 October 2021
A planetwide horror story
Insects are crucial for the flourishing of life on Earth. We should be nurturing them. Instead we’re killing them off, wholesale
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Monday 13 September 2021
Our watery wasteland
Too little water is bad for both the planet and people. Too much water is bad for them, too. We’ve created a crisis in which both extremes are happening at once
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Wednesday 1 September 2021
The butterflies have a message for us
Their brief existence and their perceived fragility is a sermon on the nature of beauty and life. How sad that 76 per cent of the UK’s resident and migratory butterfly species are in decline – with all that has to say about the future of the planet
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Thursday 26 August 2021
Much as you love to mow the lawn, let the grass grow
As appealing as tidiness is, grass is too important to the environment, to agriculture and to biodiversity to be tamed
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Tuesday 27 July 2021
Boycott! The lost Olympics
The missing and the triumphant
Hundreds of athletes didn’t get the chance to compete in the 1980 Olympics, their dreams crushed under the wheel of global politics. This is what it meant then – and means now
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Tuesday 13 July 2021
What happens when someone adds to a million-word masterpiece
A Dance to the Music of Time is one of the great works of literature. The Anthony Powell Society exists to celebrate its author’s legacy – except it’s doing rather a lot more quarrelling these days
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Tuesday 1 June 2021
Dawkins is wrong – grossly wrong – about Down’s syndrome
The author of The God Delusion made his name as a scientist, but he’s increasingly peddling his own brand of baseless religion. If only he could have been at Eddie Barnes’ 20th birthday party…
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Thursday 20 May 2021
Sport and money don’t mix well
The European Super League is just the latest example of a decades-long intrusion of business into sport. The people driving these changes don’t understand what they’re playing with
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Wednesday 21 April 2021
Peat practice
The preservation of carbon sinks, such as peat bogs, is one of the easiest steps we can take to address the climate emergency
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Thursday 1 April 2021
Simon Barnes: Why a man who sat on a dead horse became a hate figure
Brits baulk at equine cruelty, but don’t flinch when other animals suffer. Our national obsession has shaped politics and literature – and destroyed a trainer’s career
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Tuesday 23 March 2021
Tiger Woods isn’t normal
The golfer achieved greatness and threw it away. Twice. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when godly beings do extraordinary things
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Wednesday 3 March 2021
Return to the rivers
Beavers are coming back to the waters of Britain, in glorious abundance. They must not be thwarted by the meddling of our own species
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Thursday 15 October 2020
Happy the elephant
Nature’s rights
Do all wildlife and all natural habitats have the right to be protected from humans?
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Saturday 3 August 2019
The greatest man on Earth
If mankind survives another century or two, the history books of the future will record one man as the giant of our times.
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Tuesday 14 May 2019
Fractured future
- Hydraulic fracturing provides cheap access to natural gas and has transformed the US energy industry
- But in Britain, where financial benefits do not flow to landowners, the process of extraction has attracted fierce opposition from environmentalists
- To frack or not to frack? That is the question. Or is it?
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Thursday 14 March 2019
Fractured communities
- In the village of Misson, Nottinghamshire, locals are concerned about traffic disruption; increased vehicle emissions; anxiety and stress; and impact on house prices
- Some villagers opposed to the drilling for hard-to-extract gas are feeling let down by planning decisions they believe were imposed unfairly
- Wherever fracking is proposed, it is opposed. Is it time to ask more fundamental questions about our attitudes to energy?
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Sunday 3 March 2019
Oil and water
- Hydraulic fracturing is a proven way of getting inaccessible fossil fuel
- Its high-pressure methods have attracted widespread protest ranging from fear of earthquakes to water pollution
- Its supporters argue that it is a vital new source of cheap energy and would make the UK less dependent on imported oil and gas
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Monday 26 July 2021
Boycott! The lost Olympics
With human rights groups demanding a diplomatic boycott of next year’s Winter Olympics in Beijing, we look back to Moscow 1980, and ask what’s the lesson of the most notorious Olympic boycott in modern times?