Old Emir/new Emir The little kingdom of Qatar, which sticks out like a thumb into the Arabian Gulf, is a fiefdom belonging to the Al Thani family. Happily for them, it’s a thumb that’s stuck in a magic pudding, which just goes on and on giving – at current estimates more than $200 [...]

Hands off our national treasure My friend down the road never “bakes a cake”, she “does a Nigella”. I’m sure she’s not alone. Is there a kitchen bookshelf in Britain that does not have a thumbed edition of How To Eat or Feast or some other of Nigella [...]

U-Plu It’s all been a bit jagged for, well, years. For most people, the ongoing U-Plu (Uranus-Pluto square) has not gone smash-bang and changed everything. It’s felt more like a massive arduous grinding shift; a huge stone cog that judders along, sending out sparks every now and [...]

The Rhinemaidens The Elbe, the Vistula, the Inn, the mighty Danube himself, the busy Rhine – the rivers of central Europe are swollen, bursting their banks, rolling across the countryside, swallowing roads, cars, houses. Twenty people have lost their lives. The river gods are hungry. They are [...]

Lying in bed, feeling a little strange, a little light-headed. The sun sends blocks of light across your duvet; because it is broad daylight, and you alone are not at work or at school. Everyone else is busy. There are noises in the house: a tap runs in the kitchen; a distant radio, a car in [...]

The angels are calling Nelson Mandela. He may not go yet, but they are very close. When a death is at the right time, often Jupiter, the planet of benevolence and generosity arrives, ready to shepherd the soul on its journey. Mandela’s Jupiter Return is on June 3Oth. When Mandela was [...]

Agia Sofia: layers of meaning Photo: Osvaldo Gago, wikimedia commons If you stand still in the middle of the vast space of the Agia Sofia, Istanbul’s great mosque/church, as the masses of tourists swirl around you and the silvery light filters from high up windows, you can almost feel [...]

Lovely Audrey Hepburn, b. May 4 Is there a Taurus “look”? Judge for yourself. There’s a whole collection of very beautiful Bulls in this previous post on the Oxford Astrologer. Click here.

The eagle is another symbol for Scorpio. My friend Michael Wolfstar, who runs the website Neptune Cafe, wrote to me after reading my previous post American Aprils. He didn’t disagree with the substance of it, but he wanted to point out that the chart he uses for the US has Scorpio Rising [...]

The “Minutemen”, American revolutionaries ready to snatch up their weapons at a moment’s notice, confront the redcoats. Their flexibility, speed and the urgency of their cause was a big factor in their victory. Allied to the fact that they were on home territory. Even though [...]

Winning her second term 1983. The whole country was frozen, dry and still in March and early April. In my garden, which at this time of year is usually bursting with buoyant blooms, nothing changed for weeks. This was all due to the strange, bitter weather, of course. Spring had been arrested. [...]

So now it’s naughty little Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, which is giving the eurozone the screaming abdabs. Aphrodite is the Greek Venus, of course. In astrology, Venus rules money, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that Cyprus was, until a week ago, a great place to get your [...]

Pope Francis. More than half of the denizens of this planet have just had a new leader chosen for them. Two small groups of powerful people within two vast, and rather arcane institutions have voted in two new leaders on opposite sides of the world. President Xi Jinping We have a new Pope, [...]

Here is what I wrote about Syria last spring. “Let us pray for as many ceasefires as possible, because this is a long, drawn-out struggle. I really hate to be pessimistic, but it seems to me there is a strong potential for civil war, whether Assad himself stays or goes. If the [...]

Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln. Sitting in a darkened cinema and watching Daniel Day-Lewis filling up and spilling out of the screen is a pleasure: sometimes terrifying, sometimes heartbreaking, always visceral. He’s an actor who gets right into your guts. There’s no time of [...]

Spanish does not have to be your first language if you want to make it in Hollywood, you’re a man and your Sun is in Pisces. But maybe it helps… Javier Bardem (March 1, 1969) Benicio del Toro (Feb 19, 1967) Raul Julia (Mar 9, 1940) Just wondering…

There’s a lovely little google doodle today of the planets moving around the our star, the Sun. It’s there in celebration of Nikolaus Copernicus’ 500th birthday. Copernicus’ book, On The Revolution of the Celestial Spheres, in which he posited that the Earth and planets [...]

(This is the second part of my piece on the UK. There is much more to say, but for now, this will suffice.) Sometimes it feels like Britain is a boxer still upright after 10 rounds but punch drunk: standing up because of a combination of will power and show business. One blow after another [...]

Corridors of power under a Neptune transit. For a month or so last summer what it meant to be British in the 21st century seemed so clear – in an eccentric sort of way. There were James Bond and the Queen and Mr Bean cavorting about, and various sporty types and dancing nurses and Voldemort, [...]

Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle putting the sex into P&P It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is [...]