New York My good friend George Szamuely, who is very big in the Jewish community of the Bagel, swears this is a true story. (George’s father, incidentally, was Tibor Szamuely, a great man who managed to leave the Gulag with 5,000 books and was writing leaders for The Spectator when he died suddenly at the
To prepare for the collapse of Western civilisation, which seems to be more imminent with every news bulletin, I’m learning about wild food. Two months ago I learnt how to identify, prepare, cook and eat several different types of seaweed. Last week, I went on a ‘fungus foray and feast’. The foray attracted a dozen
The Astoria Hotel in St Petersburg is acknowledged by one and all to be the best hotel in town. This doesn’t seem to be a matter of opinion, taste or committee, so much as an unassailable truth. My wife mentioned that we were going to St Pete’s to our impossibly rich neighbours and they named
I experienced what the American self-help guru Dr Phil calls a ‘defining moment’ the other day. I’d just taken stock of my life and, frankly, things didn’t look good. The house I’ve bought in Acton — and which I can’t possibly afford — is already worth less than I paid for it. My wife has
Enough of these two-year-old babies and equine whippets racing over the length of a few suburban lawns. Not a moment too soon it is time for hardier sorts and for the winter sport, for sturdy mud-stained limbs and exhaled breath hanging in dank November air. First, though, some past business, and I fear that if
In need of a positive spin from anywhere, ITV can at least console itself with the plaudits for its exclusive live coverage of rugby’s recent World Cup. The oddity (probably unnoticed by most viewers) was that the channel’s senior commentary team and many of its studio sages had been rented for the tournament from its
Q. Two years ago I purchased a pair of Beretta shotguns which are ‘over and under’. In the shooting field this caused others to peer suspiciously down their noses at my gleaming new barrels. Generally it is only acceptable to arrive at a shoot with antique guns and when asked about your weapons’ provenance to
Do you remember when, the other week, I went to St Alban, got lost and ended up in the wrong restaurant entirely, where I said, ‘Am I in St Alban?’ and was told, ‘No, we’re Divo, a Ukrainian restaurant. St Alban is over the road’? Well, what I didn’t say was that while in Divo
Encouraged by those blancmange-makers of the linguistic kitchen, the Queen’s English Society, listeners have recently been having a go at the BBC. One left a website comment: ‘“He was going too fast” — the word fast is an adjective not an adverb but you wouldn’t know it these days!’ But fast is an adverb too,
