31 October 2009
New York
One felt the backlash against the BNP–BBC fiasco all the way to the Big Bagel, with local papers commenting on the lynching of Nick Griffin by rent-a-crowd minorities. Even people who think England is in Canada heard about it and called the freak show unfair and stage-managed, confirming the perception that Britain is a nation that has totally lost its way. Personally, I wasn’t surprised in the least. Dimbleby is a pompous clown, Jack Straw a mincing shyster of a man posing as a leader of men, and Griffin is, well, Griffin: it is the unbearable picking on...
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Mvuu Lodge, Liwonde, Malawi
I arrived at the jetty in pitch darkness. A boat was waiting to ferry me across the river. On the other side I was handed a refreshing drink and asked to sign a waiver form exempting the management from legal action by my next of kin if I was attacked by wild animals during my stay. Then I was shown to my tent.
The ranger led me along a sandy path across open bush. It was a bit of a hike. My tent was ten yards from a lagoon, explained the ranger, when we got...
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24 October 2009
New York
Something’s bothering me about the Polanski business. No, unlike Harvey Weinstein and Bernard-Henri Lévy — not to mention that Mitterrand paedophile — I will not defend Roman’s actions with a 13-year-old, but I will say that, with friends like his making fools of themselves defending him, it will be a miracle if he gets off with a slap on the wrist. Although this may sound pompous, I doubt if any of his defenders have known Polanski as long as I have — 40 years and counting — but let’s take it from the top.
What Hugo Rifkind...
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17 October 2009
It’s quite unusual to eat similar things together. If we’re having carrots, for example, it’s normal to eat only one type of carrot, but anyone who was to taste three completely different carrots one after the other — say a biodynamic baby carrot, a medium-sized organic purple one and a fat luminous orange one — just once would know, for ever, what type of carrot he prefers, which must surely be a useful thing to know. The point is that it’s really very hard to tell how much nicer one thing is than another unless you taste them side-by-side, and...
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New York
When A Moveable Feast was published in 1964 I had been living in Paris for six years. I was 27 and in love with Papa Hemingway’s favourite city, one that he described as ‘a mistress who always has new lovers’. One didn’t speak this way back then, but the book really blew my mind. Totally. Papa had died three years before that, and reading his obituaries I had decided to follow the writing life, despite the fact that I had failed English at school and — according to my father — was incapable of writing a coherent letter...
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Prince Philip is right about modern television sets. He says they are poorly designed. If one needs to adjust one’s set, he told a television interviewer, one has to get down on all fours with magnifying glass, instruction manual, and a torch between one’s teeth, and virtually make love to the thing. He also has a horror of remote controls. The smallness and mysteriousness of the symbols irritate him. For keen-eyed ten-year-old children, he says, they are fine. But for elderly dukes they are a maddening, unfathomable mystery.
I wonder whether he’s been on all fours on the carpet...
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