On the A1, at the border of England and Scotland, a miracle unfolded… - May 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 24th, 2015

Are we naturally selfish? Or do we have an innate sense of empathy for our fellow living things? The radio journalist Herbert Morrison watched the Hindenberg come down and announced, “Oh! The humanity!” And once I stood outside a pub on the canal in Camden and watched a crowd of drunken men laughing and cheering…

It’s a titanic struggle between two tortoises – and not a hare in sight - May 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - May 3rd, 2015

The Thracian slave Aesop is historically lauded as the master of the fabular form, pitting simplistically symbolic creatures – the wily fox, the lascivious bat and the slothful sloth – against each other in tales that have delighted fans of prescriptive anthropomorphic narrative for generations. But the current race towards No 10 has an audacious…

I feel your pain, David Cameron – and I’ll be out of my job soon, too - April 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 26th, 2015

My irregular “David Mitchell is on holiday” columns on page seven of the Observer New Review frequently generate massive web traffic, with thousands of below-the-line reader comments, though, admittedly, most of them call for me to be sexually punished. But these opportunistic weekly election diaries have provoked minimal comment-is-free contributions from the Observer’s hopefully future-proof…

Somerset’s medieval lepers meet the Tory visionary dream team - April 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 19th, 2015

This week, on a break between standup tour dates, I am on holiday with the children in Nether Stowey, Somerset, from where I file the next of my election columns. As a north London Old Speckled Hen socialist I assumed there would be little political for my satirical pen to set about in Somerset, where…

Truly, this man was the son of God. And I don’t mean David Cameron - April 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 12th, 2015

Easter is the time of eternal symbols: the fictitious egg-abandoning rabbit; the female mantis, biting off its mate’s head during a loveless copulation; and, perhaps most profound, the newborn orphan lamb’s greedy suckling at the laughing prime minister’s eagerly proffered teat, a scene re-enacted every Easter by a local actor in the village of Chadlington,…

If we send the migrants back, who will cook my late-night steak? - April 2015 The Observer - By Stewart Lee - April 5th, 2015

In 1944 the London Evening Standard sent Betty Knox, of the popular music hall trio Wilson, Keppel and Betty, to cover the Normandy landings. Knox’s impromptu one-woman performance of their famous Sand Dance, a rip-roaring montage of ancient Egyptian imagery and racially insensitive soft-shoeing, was delivered under heavy bombardment on Gold Beach, and so bored…