Growing our own Sir: Rod Liddle is clearly right that ‘the people of Europe do not want any more immigration on the scale we have seen in the past five years’ and that this is one of the reasons for the rise in the populist vote (‘The populist revolution has only just begun’, 10 March).
There is a culty YouTube video shot three years ago on the laptop camera of Ruben Ostlund. It shows the film director listening live as the nominations for the Academy Awards are announced from Los Angeles. The tension mounts as they approach the foreign film category. Alas, Force Majeure from Sweden isn’t nominated. Ostlund disappears
René Magritte was fond of jokes. There are several in René Magritte (Or: The Rule of Metaphor), a small but choice exhibition at Luxembourg & Dayan, 2 Savile Row W1 (until 12 May), that includes numerous variations, accomplished and disturbing, on similar ideas to his famous ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ painting. ‘L’usage de la
Last Saturday was shaping up to be one of the best days of my life. Freddie, my ten-year-old son, had been chosen by Queens Park Rangers, our football team, as one of five ‘Local Heroes’ to be honoured at half-time — part of the club’s excellent ‘QPR in the Community’ programme. This was on account
Q. How does one avoid power handshakes? Twenty-five years of wicket-keeping have left me with pathetically fragile knuckles, and each greeting (especially from bold young men keen to show just how ‘firm’ their grip is) brings the risk of crunching fingers and cracking bones. The pain can rule out my other hobby — playing keyboards
President Trump’s acceptance of talks about denuclearisation must have been as big a shock to Kim Jong-un as his offer was to the USA. So Kim is probably scrambling, too. And if there is a positive outcome, he will live to regret it. In the 2nd century bc the two big Mediterranean players were Rome and the vast
Gstaad I never made it to Zurich but met up with Steve Bannon through the miracle of technology, thanks to my hosts at the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, who gave him my telephone number. He rang at a civilised time and we had a very cosy chat for an hour or so. I don’t know
The flight from Gatwick to France was cancelled and there was no prospect of another for three days. Paddington station was closed and the road to the south-west of England and home was impassable. Gatwick airport railway station was in chaos as train after train in both directions was cancelled due to snow. Then a
We live in a cynical world. One cannot simply advertise something for sale and expect people to believe what one is saying. The first person to turn up to view the horse lorry did not even want to test-drive it on the basis that it was clearly a death trap. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’m just
In the days when it was fashionable to mock the IQ of an American President who had taken the showbiz route to office, a Congressman reported the burning down of Ronald Reagan’s library. ‘That’s sad,’ said the hearer. ‘Yes. He lost both books.’ Racing folk don’t read much either; writers of racing books rarely stray
Little did I know, when I was railing at how Britain comes to a standstill at the first flurry of the white stuff, how marvellously it would turn out for my team. The second Camrose (home countries championship) weekend was cancelled and a substitute announced. Unfortunately, the winners of the Premier League last year (Allfrey)
Gimson’s Prime Ministers, out this week, is a crisp and stylish account of every one of them. I happened to be reading Andrew Gimson’s admiring essay on George Canning (PM for 119 days in 1827) just after Jeremy Corbyn’s parliamentary remarks about the Salisbury poisoning. The way Mr Corbyn talked, one got the impression that
If I needed a safe space, I would nominate California. Against most odds this seedbed of censorious liberalism has thrown up the antibodies to the lurgy it created. Here within a short space of each other are a group of leftists and conservatives, religious and non-religious, all of whom are united in deploring the ‘You
Whenever a Hollywood actress complains about some lecherous man, there’s blanket coverage. Even our MPs feel the need to tut. So why, when there are allegations involving 1,000 underage girls abused by child-grooming gangs in this country, does no one turn a hair? For the most part, the paedophile scandal in Telford was ignored by
Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, told the Commons that the chemical that put in hospital Sergei Skripal, a Russian spy who had defected to Britain, his daughter Yulia, and the policeman who visited their home in Salisbury, belonged to a group of nerve agents called Novichok, developed by Russia. She said that Britain must
The unclued lights, (two of two words), individually or as a pair, are of a kind and can be resolved into three separate trios. Ignore all accents and apostrophes throughout the puzzle. The highlighted squares, read in order row by row, reveal the sources of the trios. Across 7/8 The whole capital of Hainaut
Amongst the good places to be in Britain, the National Theatre and the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon are up there. What I see or do when in these places is almost secondary to being there. Soaking it up in the National Gallery is a close second. Knowing that this country once had the courage to provide
We all know that physics and maths can be pretty weird, but these three books tackle their mind-bending subjects in markedly contrasting ways. Clifford V. Johnson’s The Dialogues is a graphic novel, seeking to visualise cosmic ideas in comic-book style. Darling and Banerjee’s Weird Maths is a miscellany of fun oddities, ranging from chess-playing computers
On 25 April 2005, Jawed Karim sent an email to his friends announcing the launch of a new video site — intended for dating — called youtube.com. Within 18 months, the site was being used to view 100 million videos a day. Last year it had more than a billion users, watching five billion videos
