Briefly last week the nation chortled over its cornflakes at newspaper headlines about the ‘black spider’, and reports of letters to ministers from the Prince of Wales, and pictures of letters from ministers to the Prince of Wales heavily annotated in the sort of spidery black ink, which did look obsessive when spread across the
As so often with people in public life, the career of David Mills is beyond satire. If an anti-Blair left-wing playwright invented him, critics would accuse him of improbability. Mr Mills seems to have done almost everything which traditional Labour supporters hate. He has made a career of advising people, including the loathed Silvio Berlusconi,
A sprig of the Pilkington family was saying goodbye to his hosts. ‘I’ve an early start,’ he explained. ‘I’ve got to be at the bloody glassworks in the morning.’ When he arrived, he found that the chairman, Sir Harry Pilkington, was there before him and had left a note on his desk: ‘My boy, it
Though I say it myself, who perhaps should not, doctors make very good writers. They are usually down to earth, not a quality always found among the highly educated. They are the ultimate participant-observers of life; and a little literary talent, therefore, takes them a long way, further indeed than most others. No doubt I
AJ.P. Taylor was born a hundred years ago this month. I owe a lot to him because he was responsible for my getting an open exhibition to Magdalen, my favourite Oxford college, which I had picked out as mine when a boy of ten. Later he tutored me in modern history. You arrived at his
