New York Imagine a European country today in which a newspaper in its most populous city launches a mendacious project reinterpreting its past. The practice was perfected under the old communist system that ruled Romania, Hungary, Poland and the rest of the Soviet satellites. But it is no longer possible in that part of the
Noticing via this Low Life column that I had trench fever, the Western Front Association treated me to a year’s membership and subscription to their excellent quarterly magazine Stand To!. And if that wasn’t enough, they also offered me a place in their contingent at this year’s Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph — a
‘Did you hear it?’ said a friend of mine, red-faced with the flush of a piece of news she couldn’t wait to offload, as she rushed into a church hall where we were attending an event. She was bursting with excitement because a mutual acquaintance had just been on a radio phone-in show banging the
OK, so this is it folks, the final offer of the year and quite a toothsome one it is. Tom Harrow, the genial wine hound behind Honest Grapes, has a knack of unearthing overlooked gems on his travels, and after a quick flit to Bordeaux, he’s done it again. Not for nothing is Honest Grapes
The Law Commission has published a string of recommendations following its recent consultation on changes to hate-crime laws in England and Wales. As expected, the last one proposes that all existing hate-crime laws, as well as the new ones the commission would like to create, be swept up in a single Act of Parliament, much
The good citizens of Stevenage would be well advised to prepare extensively for the likely open-top bus parade of their most famous citizen should Lewis Hamilton clinch his position as the best -Formula 1 driver in the world (ever) this weekend in Abu Dhabi. Because it could take some time. The Hertfordshire new town is
Q. My mother-in-law has remarried and now lives in South America. She has a large family with nieces, grandchildren, godchildren, etc. So what she has done is ordered all these different Christmas presents for them to be sent via Amazon to my house for me to individually gift wrap and take to the post office.
Soho is so gilded nowadays that even drug addicts look down on it. The wasteland without must match the wasteland within. That is harmony. Soho is not a wasteland now: it is no longer that interesting. It is, rather, a shopping district with restaurants and hotels: whimsical, trivial, overpriced. People say it is our youth
My grown-up friends don’t use based in its new slangy sense, so I asked Veronica (whom I still think of as a child) what it meant. ‘It’s a Millwall thing,’ she said, chanting: ‘No one likes us. No one likes us. No one likes us. We don’t care.’ I’m not talking about the established sense,
Whit Sunday, blustery heat, and you in three-piece suit to read the Second Lesson. The day before, I’d excavated Arctic Rolls from ice-shelves in the local store’s deep freeze. We ate them reverently, like miracles we didn’t quite believe in. I threw up first and stayed in bed. You soldiered on through
One day, my fellow occupant of our cell, you’ll cease to follow in my steps, to tell me, looking through our single window, about whatever view you’ve chosen for the day. Somehow, absurdly, I’d foreseen collapse, my deserted body, our almost rhyming corpse, and that you might walk away jauntily singing to
In the first such case for 20 years, former rider Freddy Tylicki, paralysed and wheelchair-bound since his mount Nellie Dean clipped heels in a Kempton Flat race with Madame Butterfly, ridden by Graham Gibbons, has been suing Gibbons for £6 million in the High Court. Arguments have centred on whether Gibbons made a fractional misjudgment
