Society

Thursday

William Cook

Writers’ blocks

 Chicago ‘Write drunk, edit sober,’ Ernest Hemingway reportedly said, and Oak Park, on the leafy outskirts of Chicago, is the place where he became a writer (the drink came later). Here is the clapboard house where he was born, and learned to read and write, and a few blocks away is the home where his father blew his brains out in 1928, just as his son would do 33 years later. Violence is ever present in Chicago, even in affluent Oak Park, but despite its reputation (or maybe, in a way, because of it) this is an intensely literary city, and a fitting location for the new American Writers Museum.

Taki

High life | 12 October 2017

I smell a rat when it comes to Harvey Weinstein. Let’s take it from the start. The telephone rang very early in the morning and a woman’s voice told me that Harvey Weinstein wanted to speak to me. I was put on hold. I waited. And waited, and then waited some more. The reason I didn’t hang up was that I wanted to tell Harvey that if Queen Elizabeth had made me wait as long as he had I would have hung up. ‘But for you, Sir Harvey, I’ll wait an eternity.’ Well, Harvey is a Commander of the British Empire but I upgraded him a notch because, as strange

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 12 October 2017

Early on Friday morning I flew from the north of Iceland to Reykjavik, from Reykjavik to Heathrow, then I hopped aboard the night sleeper from Euston to Glasgow Central to attend the wedding of Catriona’s eldest daughter, held the next day at the Winter Gardens of the People’s Palace on Glasgow Green. Three years ago, Catriona separated from her husband after a 30-year-long union. The separation was not amicable and is as yet unsettled. Apart from a glimpse at a graduation, the wedding was the first time they had been in the same room for three years. I was invited to the reception but not to the ceremony. As the

Melissa Kite

Real life | 12 October 2017

They are building the bonfire already. In the dip where winter flooding sometimes creates a small lake, the wood and branches are being piled. A massive board has been nailed up announcing that ‘No More Material Is Required. By Order of The Bonfire Association.’ Therefore: ‘No Dumping.’ But someone has dared to disobey the order of the Bonfire Association, and has heaved an old blue sofa into the hollow. This has sparked an inquiry. While cycling the spaniels, I overheard a group of ladies stopped on the pathway overlooking the immolation site discussing what should be done. The organisers are aware. They will be dealing with it. The culprits ought

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Lazy bays

 Barbados Homesick by nature, I like my foreign places to be exotic but also to remind me of home. Barbados, for types like us, is the ideal holiday destination. Sea so warm you can loll in it for hours on end, and the charm of dusty rum shacks on hot afternoons — but also cucumber sandwiches for tea, and Sunday Matins in Anglican parish churches where they sing Victorian hymns. The cucumber sandwiches were a daily treat at our English family-owned hotel Cobblers Cove on the west coast. Afternoon tea in the drawing room is on the house, and that is only one touch among 1,000 or so that make

Robin Oakley

The turf | 12 October 2017

The mission was simple: take a load of garden refuse to the council dump and be back in time to drive Mrs Oakley to an urgent appointment in Oxford. On my return, there was no Mrs Oakley in sight. Strange, since she is the sort who will camp out at the station the evening before to catch a 9 a.m. train. She had a house key; I didn’t. Half an hour of fretting later, as I mounted a ladder to peer through the bathroom window for fear she might have slipped over and knocked herself out, an enraged Mrs Oakley appeared beneath me. She had frozen stiff on the nearby

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 12 October 2017

Somewhere between 1 and 3 a.m., I turn off the lights but I can’t turn off my whirring brain. Cards float before me, doubled contracts torment me and unbid slams haunt me. My antidote to this is Desert Island Discs. I always hope for someone who unexpectedly plays bridge or has a bridge story, Omar Sharif being the only one, until last night when I downloaded Jack Lemmon. Asked by Sue Lawley about his parents and childhood, he came up with the astonishing tale of how and why he was born in a hospital lift. His mother and father were playing bridge — and winning — and they ignored all

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 12 October 2017

Q. A well-known television mogul,whom I had met only once, came to dinner at my house. I was on good culinary form and though I say it myself, the food and wine were exceptional. For various reasons it turned into an almost bespoke dinner for the mogul, in that the other guests were all people he had been desperate to meet, and so one way or another he became the guest of honour. He even struck some sort of deal with one of them. In any case we had a great evening and he thanked me profusely as he left. The next day I opened the door to find someone

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Elle Decoration meets pub food

The Mandrake is a new ‘design hotel’ in London, which means it is for people who treat Elle Decoration magazine as their primary source of op-ed. It lives in a red-brick terrace in Fitzrovia and it feels very odd, like a corpse with the beating heart of a baby, perhaps even a Beckham baby: would it have preferred to demolish the crusty frontage and establish itself inside Heathrow Terminal 5, or a giant fridge? Who can say? And why is it named after a poisonous plant? The entrance is dark, and haunted by black-suited men. I do not know what they do, besides lurk charismatically and pretend they work for

Dot Wordsworth

Not so much

‘Kiss me mucho,’ sang my husband with a revolting leer, ‘and we’ll soar. And we’ll dance the dance of love forevermore.’ I poured myself a whisky in a vain attempt to catch up, and returned to my task. Not so much was the subject of my researches, and I soon wondered why it had only recently begun to annoy me. It qualifies as a catchphrase, I think, though some dictionaries of slang list it too. Much has been very productive of slang. Ben Jonson had characters exclaiming ‘Much!’ and meaning ‘not much’, 400 years ago. Contrariwise, since the second world war, Not much! has been used to contradict a statement

Toby Young Toby Young

I met Weinstein and, yes, I’d heard the rumours

According to an ex-employee of Harvey Weinstein’s, the movie producer once whispered something to himself that she found so disturbing she wrote it down. After leaving his film company, where she claimed to have acted as a ‘honeypot’ to lure young models and actresses to meetings with her boss in hotel rooms, she signed a confidentiality agreement. But she has decided to speak out anyway. The words he muttered were: ‘There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.’ This is one of the less shocking details in a long New Yorker article published on Tuesday in which 13 women allege that Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, including three who

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

A song of ice and snow

 Norway It might seem strange for someone who is half-Norwegian to decide on Scandinavian studies at university. But having lived in the UK my whole life, I wanted a better understanding of Scandinavia, its language, and its culture. In four years, I learned plenty of useful skills, such as the ability to read fuþark runes and point out the Norwegian influences in Disney’s Frozen. All in all, time well spent. But I always ummed and ahed when friends asked if they should pop over on a weekend break. As much as I love the country, I felt guilty about recommending it as a holiday destination. Norway is famously expensive. Recently

Katherine Forster

Stress-free slopes

 Austria One day in February each year, my three children come home from school in London, but go to sleep in Germany. We pile into our old Rover 75 Estate, take the tunnel to Calais, then drive through France, Belgium and the Netherlands before collapsing into bed in Aachen: five countries in an afternoon. The next day we cruise down the Autobahn to Munich or Salzburg, potter around the city and have an early night. The following morning we are on the ski slopes, hours before the plane gang arrive. For a ten-night ski holiday in February half-term, the most expensive ski week of the year, our total spend is

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 12 October 2017

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, when asked by Iain Dale in an interview on LBC: ‘If there was a Brexit vote now, would you vote Brexit?’ repeatedly refused to say. Earlier, briefing the House of Commons on Brexit, she said that the country must prepare for ‘every eventuality’. The government published two papers on trade and customs arrangements that envisaged ways by which Britain could thrive as an ‘independent trading nation’ even if no trade deal were reached with Brussels. Mrs May admitted that during a transitional period, the European Court of Justice would retain jurisdiction. Asked five times if the government had received legal advice on whether the

The Spectator

The new tycoons

The giants of the internet have long said that they are not publishers but mere platforms — or couriers — of the new information age. Companies such as Google and Facebook insist that they’re the digital equivalent of the vans, newsagents and paperboys who distribute what other people publish. So they ought not to be held responsible for it. In the early years of the internet, their argument made sense. Most news and comment came from newspapers and magazines (like this one). But then social media arrived and restraint vanished. Military-grade email encryption has emerged as standard, giving security to those who don’t want their email hacked, but also cover

Pabulum

2331: Anagrams

Unclued lights suggest nine different words, each made up of the same five letters. These letters will appear in the completed grid in an alphabetically ordered sequence which must be shaded. Elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across 6  Young sailor turned cricketer (6, hyphened) 12  In the normal way all sections united in study (10, three words) 13  Wrongfully seize moneylender soft King Edward spared (5) 14  Connected to god, visionary peeled bananas (7) 15  College in California returned call concerning religious instruction (10) 16  Type of bathroom to fit in exactly (7, two words) 22  Plunder from woman’s junk? (7) 25  Messages in the box backed Congress (7) 27 

Cally Squires

Desert flocks

 Ras Al Khaimah It’s the emirate you’ve never heard of, and a welcome antidote to the showmanship and excesses of Dubai – for now at least. The northernmost emirate, Ras Al Khaimah, is only 40 minutes by car from Dubai international airport, and is quickly emerging as an open tourist destination for the savvy traveller. Unlike in Dubai, genuine Emirati culture is still highly visible. There are several mosques worth seeing, from the ornate Sheik Zayed in the Corniche region to the traditional Mohammad Bin Salem mosque, built from coral and beach rock. Other highlights are the working date farms and the historic Dhaya fort, built in the 19th century

Patrick Kidd

Story of the hurricane

The Great Storm of 1987 doesn’t have a name like those hurricanes that devastate the Caribbean and the United States each winter — it wasn’t until Abigail in November 2015 that British storms were given a personality — but it deserves its capital letters. The worst storm to hit England since 1703 killed 18 people, felled 15 million trees, famously reducing Sevenoaks to Oneoak, and cost the insurance industry more than £2 billion. It also left the City, where trading was closed at lunchtime the next day, unprepared for the Wall Street crash that led to Black Monday on 19 October. The storm, which struck 30 years ago this Sunday,

The Spectator

Solution to 2328: Second coming

The suggested title is Brideshead Revisited, HEEDS/RABID (6A/42) being an anagram of BRIDESHEAD. The six characters, all members of the Flyte family, are ALEXANDER (Lord Marchmain) (21D), TERESA (Lady Marchmain) (37), and their children, BRIDEY (17), SEBASTIAN (8), JULIA (33) and CORDELIA (19). FLYTE (diagonally from the eighth row) was to be shaded.   First prize Daisy Jestico, London SE23 Runners-up Mrs J. Sohn, Gorleston-on-Sea, Norfolk; E. Feinberg, Rancho Mirage, California