Gstaad I’m not usually nonplussed, but this is very strange: the memoir of Barbara Black, the wife of my good friend Lord Black, simply doesn’t make sense where certain people she writes about are concerned — persons I happen to know well. The list is not long, and I’ll start with David Graham, her third
Hairpin bends in a stony forest. Downhill. Steep, then steeper. Smooth frictionless tarmac. I’ve got the car barely under control. A narrow bridge over a ravine. Single file only. A van hurtling uphill. A recessed drain — unavoidable. Bang, crash, wallop. The car continues but feels mortally wounded. We limp to a passing place 50
Every time I get on a horse I have to face the likelihood that a dog, or pack of dogs, will have me off. This issue of idiot dog owners walking their dogs for the first time now they are working from home is a situation that has developed since Covid but as far as
There are few finer places to be during these endlessly dark days than Bellamy’s in Bruton Place, London W1. And there are few finer folk to be there with than Chloe Smith, from strategic partnerships at The Spectator, and Laura Taylor, marketing director of Private Cellar. Gavin Rankin, le patron qui mange ici, is as
A friend emailed me earlier this week in despair about the Prime Minister. ‘Boris reminds me of a hereditary king — Edward II or Henry VI — who is so staggeringly incompetent that he must be removed before doing too much damage,’ he wrote. ‘I felt the same way about May but Boris is worse.’
Q. Almost a year ago I attended the funeral of my godfather — a bachelor and distant relation whom I had seen increasingly infrequently. When I offered my condolences to his brother, he mentioned that godchildren had been very well catered for in the will and that as an executor he would be in touch
Three bottles, three questions that delivered three different answers. I was in Dorset — cannot keep away — enjoying the Indian summer while cursing the government’s ineptitude. As always, we ate well. I believe that those of us said to be at risk are supposed to bulk up. I did so with the aid of
My husband may not often be right, but he had some cogent criticism of the much-quoted words of Geoffrey Howe at his resignation in 1990: ‘Rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game
About 15 years ago I noticed a few surviving chattel houses in Barbados and wondered what they were. As it turns out, they were an ingenious solution to an age-old problem. These tiny yet exquisite buildings, with barely room for a bed, chair and stove, owe their origins to the abolition of slavery. Though a
It is all, it seems, in the tweaks. So said Aidan O’Brien, Ireland’s master-trainer supreme, before his tough filly Magical defeated Ghaiyyath, the world’s highest-rated horse, in the Irish Champion Stakes on Saturday. He wouldn’t have run her against the relentless galloper who had beaten Magical the month before, he insisted, if he hadn’t felt
