With his customary impeccable timing (Saturn in Virgo), jazzman Dave Brubeckwas died yesterday, just two days short of his 92nd birthday. But today is his actual Solar Return, the moment in the year the Sun returns to the place it was when you were born. The planets of ending and [...]

After I gave birth to my first daughter in a London hospital, I shared a room with three other women – a Palestinian, an Israeli, and a London Iranian. No kidding. There was some awkward negotiating around drips, cots, nurses and nappies. But the presence of tiny new babies creates a certain [...]

It turns out that the seven-times Tour de France champ Lance Armstrong cheated. Apparently, he was doped up to the eyeballs, bullied other team members into joining him and lied and lied and lied. The US Anti-Doping Agency says Armstrong was the leader of “the most sophisticated, [...]

Little Red Riding Wolf: The fairy tale give some good advice about how to deal with predators. A while ago I met someone who had been molested by the late kid’s TV host Jimmy Savile back in the 1970s. I won’t disgust you with the details; he was a little boy at the time and […]

Romney: Sun in Pisces (the mirror) Gemini Rising…. Mitt Romney is the son of two truly remarkable people: his mother Lenore – clever, beautiful, a trained actress and a candidate for the senate when women did not do that, and his father George – an immigrant who pulled himself up from [...]

Smith I vowed a long time ago not to watch Doctor Who until he regenerated as a woman. So far, the Doctor has had 11 incarnations, each with his own take on the character but none with a different gender. However, my children, as usual, changed my mind, so here at Schloss Astrology we have [...]

Could this be the next Prime Minister? Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has had a fantastic summer, using the Olympics to upstage the Prime Minister David Cameron, repeatedly. His season of triumph climaxed with a rabble-rousing speech on Monday outside Buckingham Palace, when he [...]

Thomas Cromwell: fixer, strategist, statesman – Scorpio. Hans Holbein King Henry VIII – charmer, playboy, wife-killer and the first head of the Church of England – had an axe-man, Thomas Cromwell, whose job it was to facilitate the King’s desires – divorce, dissolution, beheadings, [...]

My colleague Jackie Taylor has allowed me to publish her clever piece about Star Trek, which originally appeared in the Astrological Journal. This is the second tranche. To read the first part about Star Trek‘s (rather inauspicious) beginnings, click here. Central to Star Trek’s fame and [...]

Martina Navratilova Martina Navratilova, the great tennis player, gave a touching interview on the radio last week. She was wiping away tears within the first few minutes as she recalled being separated from her family when she defected to the West more than 30 years ago. She has the Moon [...]

This beautiful hybrid orchid is named after Aung San Suu Kyi. You never know who you’re going to see in Oxford. A while ago I got to say good morning to a fistful of bishops as I got out of the car. This afternoon, we saw Aung San Suu Kyi whizz past in a security […]

Most self-help books have about three ideas in them which are padded out with a lot of white space and bullet points. But there are a few which are absolutely brilliant. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way has sold about a gazillion copies in the two decades not because it’s [...]

About two thousand years ago, peace reigned across the Roman Empire. From Alexandria to the Hadrian’s Wall, all opposition had been crushed and people were able to trade, farm and prosper without fear of being molested by marauding barbarians. Meanwhile, in the bustling, wealthy, [...]

Yes, I know we like to talk about roses and kisses and sweet romance, about Romeos and Juliets, the ones that got away and the ones that might just come back now that Venus has turned retrograde… But Venus is not just the planet of love – she rules money, cold hard cash. And she’s [...]

Ted Hughes was best known as a powerful nature poet before he was made laureate in 1984. It seemed like a strange choice; this poet of fox and moor, black-backed gull and deadly pike, above all of wildness, asked to write about the baroque, many-layered, structured, civilised, profoundly tamed [...]

“The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him wild thing and Max said, “I’ll eat you up!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything.” Maurice Sendak’s short masterpiece Where The Wild Things Are is a [...]

Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France. Sun Aquaris/MoonPisces Like so many nations, France is in a right mess. Unemployment, social unrest, shambolic finances, a failing education system – and perhaps worst of all, no clear vision for the future. And France is in the midst of general election. [...]

Can you guess this man’s sign? Let me give you some clues. His black shirt and his shaved head, his solitude and his silences, his solo morning swim in the sea. His job: he is a police detective. His love life: messy. Have you guessed yet? You’ll laugh when you look at the chart. [...]

A member of the Free Syrian Army, an avatar of Pluto wearing his helmet of invisibility. This was written by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats in the 1919 in the aftermath of World War 1 and the Easter Rising in Ireland. As well as being a poet, Yeats was a visionary and a mystic. […]

As I was making soup just now, I had some (very obvious) thoughts about Anthony Robbins chart that I thought I’d better share immediatement. Right now, of course, Mercury is over his South Node and Mercury, so it makes sense to think about him again. Also he has just resold his abortive [...]