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The forgotten genius of Dennis Price

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the sad death of the actor Dennis Price, star of the classic 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, regarded by many to be the greatest British film of all time. Price was only 58 when he died from cirrhosis of the liver and complications following a broken hip, in a public ward of Guernsey’s main hospital. In the same way his co-star Alec Guinness stole the limelight in Kind Hearts, so the shock break-out of the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur war did the same on the day of his death. His debts caused him to ‘beat a strategic retreat’ to the Channel Islands

Britain’s most haunted country houses

For centuries, the English country house has provided the setting for some of the most terrifying fiction in our history. These isolated buildings, with their many empty corridors, secret backstairs, shut-up attic rooms and dark corners, their inherent eeriness has made them iconic settings for chilling encounters. But which real country houses inspired their fictional counterparts? Menabilly House, Cornwall Daphne Du Maurier’s mysterious Manderley was inspired by two country houses. The exterior was based on Menabilly House in Cornwall, an estate which Du Maurier would eventually rent from the Rashleigh family five years after Rebecca’s release, while the interior was inspired by Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire. Du Maurier’s haunting description

The beautiful sadness of Matthew Perry

Matthew Perry, who died yesterday, was the funniest of the Friends – and the saddest. ‘What must it be like to not be crippled by fear and self-loathing?’ his character, Chandler Bing, asked. It seems Perry never quite figured out the answer. Chandler was a brilliant comic creation – and Perry, a melancholic clown, perfectly suited to the part. Perry stood out among his Friends castmates with his impeccable comic timing and the unique cadence with which he delivered his lines.  To most of the world, he will always be Chandler – the brilliant, charming, sad-funny clown But he was insecure and addictive. Perry once said that, when the live studio

Tips for Doncaster and Newbury tomorrow

I have a policy of not betting or tipping on jump racing until at least the first week of November. That’s because the early season form over chases and hurdles is so difficult to predict in that it is hard to know which horses are fit from their summer break and which are not. Having said that, there is no doubt that the jumps cards at Cheltenham and Kelso tomorrow excite me far more than anything offered up on the level by Doncaster or Newbury. Yet, I will nevertheless stick to my self-imposed punting rules. If this race was run every Saturday for a year, there would be a different

Gareth Roberts

My favourite, ferocious teacher

In 1979, I was 11 years old, and I had a quite remarkable teacher. Don’t worry, though – this isn’t going to be one of those anodyne paeans to an inspirational educator that the Department for Education use in their ads to lure people into teaching. In fact, if the lady I’ll refer to here as Mrs G were somehow to be reincarnated and placed in front of a Year 6 classroom of today, Ofsted would have her frogmarched out after about 20 minutes.  She once sent me to the local parade of shops to buy a box of Tampax  Mrs G was a fearsome sight – in her late

Sofia Coppola made girls sad

When Cecilia Lisbon, the youngest of the five Lisbon daughters in Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides, winds up in the hospital having survived an attempt on her own life, the doctor tells her: ‘You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.’ ‘Obviously, doctor,’ Cecilia replies, ‘you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.’ The dark edge of adolescence runs through Sofia Coppola’s films. You get a sense from even the most playful and romantic scenes that, behind the lustre of expensive clothes or dappled sunlight, girlhood is tragic and that its transformations are traumatic. Coppola’s eye for these contrasts makes her films brilliant. It also, whether she intends

Olivia Potts

Dark, bold and perfect for autumn: how to make the perfect honey cake

I did not plan to cook a loaf cake when I embarked on concocting a traditional honey cake recipe. The original plan was to explore the Russian honey cake, or medovik, which dates back to the 19th century, and has a rich history. It is the War and Peace of the cake world: thick and a real undertaking. A long, careful assembly process, with up to a dozen layers of thin sponge – flavoured with honey and baked ever so briefly – interleaved with honey-flavoured buttercream, followed by a long chill, and then covered in more buttercream and cake crumbs. It is what we cookery writers like to euphemistically call

It’s time to ban balsamic

Balsamic vinegar, according to a recent poll, is now considered an essential store cupboard ingredient by a quarter of all Brits. I detest it. This dark, syrupy fermented grape juice is like Marmite – you love it or hate it. Partly because it is overused, and also the numerous versions produced, I find myself flinching when I see it on a kitchen or dining room table. The Italians still behave, at least on the culinary front, as though they are a series of different countries When I first started travelling to Italy in the 1980s, I was given invaluable lessons in food crime: one, never, ever, under any circumstances, order

The secret to learning a language quickly

Becoming proficient in a so-called ‘easy’ language (for English speakers, French is relatively easy) often takes hundreds of hours; a difficult language (Mandarin anyone?) takes several thousand. That’s good for language teachers, but not so good for the learners.  Language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century Even after putting in all those hours of following an expensive course, many people never become proficient. How can so much time and effort amount to such little progress? Language learning happens inside the brain, making the processes involved difficult to observe and understand – that’s why language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century, and why,

The night my friends went missing on a Spanish train

Twenty years ago, the Spanish railway company RENFE stole my girlfriend’s father. There were four of us – my girlfriend, her dad, and a university friend of ours. We had been in Spain for more than a month, walking the Camino de Santiago. Now it was time to head home, first by train to Bilbao and then on to Stansted by air. Once we found our seats on the train, in the rearmost carriage, I settled in for the long haul – the journey is ten hours – with my battered copy of Herodotus, which I was determined to finish before the start of the new academic year. I was