New York Already on your idiot box via Netflix is a mini-series about a man who also used one name, but burned out rather early due to an outsized ego and too much coke. His name was Halston, and his fame was based on the fact that he designed a pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy
On the Saturday morning of the Ascension Day bank holiday, I swung down the stairs and ladder to the little bedroom-cum-book room and did the ironing. For me ironing is therapy. If the internal critic becomes too negative or noisy, I stick a playlist on and steam flatten the commentary line by line. On Saturday
More threatening letters from the NHS demanding I let them jab me up with two Covid vaccinations. Or as the builder boyfriend put it: ‘Now that more people are choking to death on paella getting stuck in their windpipe than are dying of Covid, how are they going to force us to get vaccinated? And
I haven’t been to Le Marche for yonks. Heck, I haven’t been anywhere for yonks. Who has? My last jaunt abroad was an overnight flit to Paris in February last year. It was huge fun, with the opera followed by such an exhaustive bar crawl that I needn’t have booked a hotel. I only went
Scarcely a day passes without a major British institution announcing it is ‘decolonising’ itself. Most recently it was the turn of Shakespeare’s Globe, which announced a series of ‘anti-racist Shakespeare webinars’ as part of its ‘commitment to decolonising the plays of Shakespeare’. That brought me up short. At the time of Shakespeare’s birth, England didn’t
Q. We have been invited to a virtual wedding. Is it correct form to send a present?— P.F., Barrow Street, Wilts A. Virtual weddings are so new that the rules of etiquette have yet to be drawn up. Setting aside the large sums of money you will not need to shell out for transport and
The last Saturday of lockdown — inshallah — and we were discussing literature. Specifically, when does a detective story become a novel? T.S. Eliot edited the World’s Classics edition of The Moonstone and gave a copy to A.E. Housman, with the inscription: ‘The best detective story in English or any other language.’ Surely Eliot was
‘I must level with you, level with the British public, many more families are going to lose loved ones.’ That is what Boris Johnson said on 20 March last year. On 14 May this year, he said: ‘I have to level with you that this new variant could pose serious disruption.’ In between, the Prime
His habit is watching sceneryChanging at the bend,The view lying back encirclingIts dishevelment with an arm. Or watching a waterfallSilently on film, jumped shotsLeaving him unsplashed.It is visiting a Sussex castle Where he pictures the skirmishingOf frightened soldiery.It is any crowd he seesIn profile, fathers and sons anonymous As collectors’ coins. He observesThe cheerful blindness
in a racy world of competitive types, because, you know, two brains are generally better than one. Like the puttering hybrid – who’s the engine and who the battery? Like the panting pantomime horse, who has which end? Tirelessly, observers try to subvert the scheme, an affront to their own marital dynamic. Some days they
On 9 June 1865, Charles Dickens was involved in a railway accident on a viaduct at Staplehurst, Kent, while returning from France with his mistress Ellen Ternan. Ten people died and forty were injured. Dickens himself died five years to the day after the crash. I stopped mid-sentence – a broken train of thought. On
Among the horrors, some aspects of lockdown were bizarrely less gruelling than expected; indeed for some people, the experience was mildly positive. It’s time to ask ourselves why. One possible explanation is ‘jomo’ — the joy of missing out. Much ostensibly voluntary human activity is not really voluntary at all. Like dressing for dinner in
