At the same time as it tries to loosen things up, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is told by the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, that schools must put more emphasis on ‘global warming, the British slave trade and the anti-slavery campaign, Britishness, the British Empire, racism and ethnicity, immigration, Commonwealth, cookery’. It would hardly have
Ghosts are fashionable just now. There are two productions of Ibsen’s play and a movie. At dinner parties, if conversation falters or begins to move down forbidden (by me) tramlines, I ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ Instantly there is a babble. Nobody believes in ghosts personally. But everyone knows somebody who does, and provides
When Win Bischoff and his colleagues Robert Swannell and David Challen threw a party last month to celebrate 100 years of working together at Schroders and Citigroup, it was quite a bash. Not only did it draw the cream of FTSE-100 chiefs — Sir Chris Gent, Sir Nigel Rudd and Stuart Rose, to name just
Not many people seem to realise this, but it’s cheaper in the long run to buy a solid carved mahogany antique chest of drawers than a modern pine one from Ikea. Without having to search far, you can get a beautiful Victorian chest of drawers in excellent condition for £200 which will last you and
‘Blunkett Is Blind’ screamed a pertinent piece of graffiti in Sheffield city centre in the 1980s. This wasn’t just a statement of the bleeding obvious, as a London cabbie might say, but a condemnation of David Blunkett’s stewardship as leader of Sheffield City Council for the seven years before he became MP for Sheffield Brightside
