On 1 July 1961, a beautiful 17-year-old girl appeared on the cover of Paris Match, then in its heyday: ‘C’est une deb,’ announced the cover, the once upon a time annual British ritual having crossed the Channel to the land of cheese. Her name was Cristina de Caraman, daughter of the Duke de Caraman, and
My brother’s three Borders are called Roxy, Ruby and Taz. My one ambition in life is to own a terrier again, or rather three terrier bitches, just so that I can call them Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart. (Lear, mad on the heath: ‘The little dogs and all, Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at
‘Question 2. In which year did the Berlin Wall come down?’ shouted the quizmaster. And then he repeated this with dramatic pauses, as quizmasters are apt to do: ‘In which year…did the Berlin Wall…come down?’ ‘Oh, yeah!’ said the youngest person in our team. ‘I just got that!’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Berlin Wall!’ she said,
My house in south Northamptonshire looks out over parkland on which Henry VIII used to hunt deer with Anne Boleyn. The only deer on it nowadays are the unhunted muntjacs, charmless little creatures that only arrived in England from Asia 400 years later; but there still are plenty of foxes, which carry out periodic massacres
No sporting event anywhere compresses so much drama, emotion and character into a single venue as the Cheltenham Festival. It wasn’t just an extraordinary Gold Cup — in that six horses jumped the last with a chance of winning and at least two jockeys will go to their graves believing they were denied a victory
It looks as though Hacked Off has finally won its three-year battle for tighter regulation of the press. Why do I say this? Because on Tuesday it published a list of 200 people who agree with them in various national newspapers. These weren’t just the usual suspects — Hugh Grant, Rowan Williams, Richard Curtis. And
When I worked at Berry Bros & Rudd 20 years ago, I had a wonderfully eccentric customer who liked to ring up during bathtime. He was a confirmed claret lover and, although he longed to broaden his horizons, he could never quite muster the courage to do so. We would spend 20 minutes or so
There are many eternal questions. Why do all aircraft, no matter how much your ticket cost, where you’ve come from, and what time you land, always dock at a gate requiring a walk of not less than 47 miles to the terminal? Why was there no running water in the taps on my train to
Q. I am always making or receiving phone calls which get cut off. When I ring the person back their line is engaged as they are trying to ring me too. Mary, whose responsibility is it to ring back when a call has been disturbed in this way? Can you use your immense authority to
Highgrove is the country house of the Prince of Wales. I write about Highgrove because, although it is not a restaurant, even of the wackiest kind — which can only make me fantasise that Ludwig of Bavaria opened a gay sauna in Neuschwanstein castle — the prince does admit strangers when he is not there
‘Ask your telephone,’ said my husband satirically when I made an innocent enquiry on a point of fact. My telephone was having a little rest, since it had run out of juice in the annoyingly capricious way these machines have. But my husband had unwittingly hit upon a trend in modern culture: that we hardly
I was in love for a whole week after Episode One: Your voice so tender, so knowledgeable, your slender hands and feet. In Episode Two, doubts crept in. Were you hogging the camera or was it just that the camera loved your profile, your man-of-the-people T shirts, your breeze-ruffled hair? Episode Three opens with you
