On a wintry afternoon, alone with the kids, I visited the Central Park Zoo. It’s not a very big place, just zoo-sized, and after seeing the animals, we found ourselves lining up to enter the little mo...

A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88. One of a select band of writers from any discipline to earn his own adjective – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he delighted in the most improbable juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); early 19th-century landscape gardening and chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics and the love poetry of Sappho in Rock ’n’ Roll (2006). Continue reading...