Life

High life

Why Simone de Beauvoir is my kind of woman

New York   A strange thing happened to me here in the Bagel last week. Having read the recent review of a biography of Susan Sontag in these here pages, my plan was to compare her with another feminist, Simone de Beauvoir (I have just finished an opus about Beauvoir, Paris and the Left Bank

Low life

The truth behind those Airbnb snaps

Catriona and I had agreed that a terrace for smoking, eating, drinking and painting was a necessity rather than a luxury, blow the expense. One of the photographs of an Airbnb just above my price range showed an elegant round table with two romantic champagne flutes and an uninterrupted terrace view of a ridiculous sunset

No sacred cows

The real reason Nicola Sturgeon is campaigning against Brexit

Nicola Sturgeon, who claimed this week that ‘Scotland is rich enough, strong enough and big enough’ to take its place ‘among the proud, independent nations of the world’, is a slippery fish. She claims the case for Scottish independence will be strengthened by the UK’s departure from the European Union and yet she campaigned for

Spectator Sport

The joy of Japanese-style rugby

Proud son of Wexford he may be, and of doughty farming stock too, but the heart sinks at the prospect of seeing yet again Tadhg Furlong, all 20-odd stone of him, emerge from a pile of bodies laying siege to the opposition line to lumber over for a try. Ireland’s brand of suffocating rugby has

Dear Mary

Food

Mind your language

How the language of blackjack crept into Brexit

In the Times, Janice Turner wrote that she had been watching Remainers and Leavers ‘like degenerate gamblers, double down, bet all their chips to bag the purest prize, then throw in the farm and their firstborn child. Anything but fold.’ There is much doubling down at the moment. Beatrice Wishart, a Lib Dem MP, said