It’s easy to forget in all the fuss about the youngest ever congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that her main asset is her mind (Mercury on the MC). Her evisceration of the campaign finance laws this week demonstrated her razor sharp intelligence and ability to get to the heart of an [...]

Intelligent, emotional and true — Nancy Wilson called herself a “song stylist”. She managed to mix irony and compassion in her interpretations seemingly effortlessly. She died today at the ripe age of 81. Listen to her caught-you-red-handed song, Guess Who I Saw Today, for an [...]

Fragile, strong, sweet, sharp — a little broken. George Michael was a superstar with a seemingly boundless musical gift, but it was his vulnerability that made him special. Something, somewhere, had been cracked (one felt), and, like a “golden repair” on a Japanese pot, it made George Michael [...]

Self-named, self-invented, self-motivated, champion boxer Muhammad Ali was a modern embodiment of the archetype of hero. He was charismatic, strong, graceful, poetic in speech, courageous in deed. He spoke up for the millions and laughed at the powerful. He took his punishment squarely and [...]

I got excited a while ago when I noticed that Brazilian premier Dilma Rousseff, Ukraine’s ex-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and Korean PM Park Geun-hye all have Venus in Capricorn, the sign of earthly power. I wondered if there would be more women at the top of the political tree with [...]

Sadko In The Underwater Kingdom by Ilya Repin (Wikimedia Commons) From Tunisia to Elizabeth Taylor, you never know who you’re going to swim past down there in the blue, blue sea. With the Sun still in Pisces, visit or revisit these OA posts on or about the sign of the Fishes. A Fortnight [...]

The rest of the world divorces, separates, splits up, breaks up, calls the lawyers, tears each others eyes out; film-star Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay frontman Chris Martin “consciously uncouple“. We may all roll our eyes at the (conscious or not) superiority of their announcement, [...]

Ariel Sharon aged 19 wikimedia commons Ariel Sharon lived a life of mythological proportions. Villain, hero, warrior; farmer, politican, bully; killer, peacemaker; and in every role “the bulldozer”. And those were just his public faces. So how come the unstoppable bulldozer [...]

Erik Satie painted by Suzanne Valadon c.1892, the epitome of the 1890s aesthete The composer Erik Satie, a well-known figure in Parisian bohemia at the turn of the 20th century, was noted for his elegance. He had seven identical beautifully-tailored grey suits which he wore in rotation. He [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“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 [...]