Life

High life

Taki: perhaps Obama should read All Quiet on the Western Front

I used to see him in El Morocco, the most famous nightclub of its era during the late Fifties and early Sixties. He was a very handsome man, beautifully tailored and with impeccable old-fashioned manners, and a heavy drinker. Wine, champagne and cognac were his drinks, and vodka later in the night. Although invited to

Low life

Jeremy Clarke: War games on Polzeath beach

We picked up the key to the caravan, let ourselves in, ascertained the phone signal situation (none) and went to the beach. Polzeath beach is the kind of bucket-and-spade beach Janet and John’s Mummy and Daddy might have chosen for their annual holiday. First, soft white sand ideal for burying Mummy;  then a broad shining

Real life

More from life

Toby Young: I’m thinking of going into politics

The Hammersmith Conservative Association will shortly be looking for a candidate to run against the sitting Labour MP in 2015 and I’m thinking of applying. But by God, it’s a tough decision. On the face of it, the case against is pretty overwhelming. The local MP, Andy Slaughter, has a majority of 3,549 and on

Spectator Sport

Sport: Nigel Lawson on the Ashes

Those of us who watched the last day of the final Ashes Test of the present series enjoyed a rare and unexpected treat — and I write as one who has been a devoted cricket follower for more than 70 years: the first first-class match I ever saw was the Royal Navy playing the Army

Dear Mary

Dear Mary | 5 September 2013

Q. In response to correspondence re. wedding gifts: there is no need for a couple to have a list at John Lewis, and then translate gifts bought into vouchers — they should simply ask for John Lewis vouchers in the first place. This will save them the inconvenience of flogging around the store and, in their

Food

A Roald Dahl tea? It reminds me more of Jimmy Savile

One Aldwych, an Edwardian grand hotel near Waterloo Bridge, is serving a Jimmy Savile tribute tea. It is not explicitly called a Jimmy Savile tribute tea; of course it is not. That would be tasteless, and people would not come to One Aldwych to eat it; it might, in fact, be lucky enough to get

Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth: We’ve been self-whipping since 1672

Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had held that Tory backbenchers were now self-whipping. When she aired this opinion on Radio 4, Michael White of the Guardian did a Frankie Howerd-style, ‘Ooh, Missus!’ routine. Surprisingly, self-whipping is no neologism. The satirical Nonconformist

Poems

Mid-term Break

I sat all morning in the college sick bay Counting bells knelling classes to a close. At two o’clock our neighbors drove me home. In the porch I met my father crying — He had always taken funerals in his stride — And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow. The baby cooed

Circular

We went about in circles one hand on the next man’s shoulders something out of Gogol or Great War blind: we ate chicken soup, which gave one old man stomach cramps: he was taken away, snotting. A trustee, if such a thing is imaginable in a lunatic asylum, clicked around as part of a service-trolley,