Here’s the definitive scoop on poor old Hellas, better known nowadays as the EU country that missed its day at the municipal dump. Greece will default sometime in 2012 and, if there are any doubters around, tell them this comes from the great economist Taki, the very same Taki who smelled a rat even before
I was sitting alone in a day room on the top floor of an NHS hospital. Presently, two women came in and sat down. One sat with her face in her hands, sobbing silently, while the other leant forward and whispered to her. Far from being consoled, the crying woman broke down still further and
Two weeks ago, the London Evening Standard outed me as one of four ‘celebrities’ who’d broken the super-injunction about Ryan Giggs. According to the newspaper: ‘Lawyers warned the stars could face a huge bill for damages after revealing the name of the Premier League footballer on microblogging site Twitter.’ My crime was to post the
As André Fabre walked off the Derby course following the success of Pour Moi, I watched one of the horse’s connections embrace him and declare, ‘I’ll tell you one thing. He’s a cocky little bastard, isn’t he?’ It wasn’t the horse the hugger had in mind: jockey Mickael Barzalona, despite winning by just a head
A friend who used to play international sport as a professional tells me he is enjoying his game infinitely more, and playing it better than ever, now he isn’t getting paid for it. A friend who used to play international sport as a professional tells me he is enjoying his game infinitely more, and playing
Q. How can you have people to stay the night — but not the next day as well? My parents have bought a flat in London. They have given my brother and me keys so we can use it when we want. This is amazing but the problem is that the flat is really central
A labour of love of the strangest kind, published posthumously, came to me this week. It is The English Wordsmith, by David Andrews (£12.99), which is nothing but 8,000 ‘important, relevant, obscure, difficult, unusual words and phrases’. He doesn’t list Shakespeare’s honorificabilitudinitatibus, but he does include floccinaucinihilipilification, presumably because of its unusual length, defining it
