Taki lives the High life On board S/Y Bushido, off Corfu From my porthole I can see Roger Taylor — drummer of Queen — talking to his three blonde and beautiful daughters. The eldest, Rory, has just become a doctor, the other two are still kids, and there are also two very talented boys, not
I asserted that my room was booked and paid for by the travel company organising my trip. Maarika, the lovely Estonian trainee receptionist, said the room was booked, yes, but not paid for. I insisted, she resisted, I gave way. I handed over my credit card and signed here, here and here. She handed over
Within three clicks of using my new laptop I am apoplectic with frustration. Why does technology always get more complicated, not less? When is someone going to make a computer that is easier to use than the last one, not more difficult? And, above all, when will my new laptop stop talking to me? It
Wow. As I’m writing this, Wendi Deng is scanning the House of Commons committee room, searching for any additional assailants, as her husband and son-in-law are testifying before the Culture, Media and Sport select committee. Ten minutes earlier, she launched herself like a missile at a pie-throwing protestor, delivering a stinging blow to his face.
Some alien force keeps attacking my laptop. Every few seconds my anti-virus security system pings me with an audible warning of attempted forced entry, a process which paralyses all thought and makes working in a library impossible. It clearly isn’t a hacker from the News of the World, so who could it be? My wildest
Strange to be writing about sport when outside it feels like Salem, where vengeful witchfinders prowl the highways and byways of the media and political landscape looking for someone or something, anything, to burn; where screeching harpies of press and internet call for the closure of papers they don’t like; and where sanctimonious preachers declaim
Your problems solved Q. The Welsh have this annoying habit of turning up unannounced. I think it must derive from the days when they all lived in little terraces beneath the pits and the mines, and it was a come-one-come-all community. In 1978 I moved to England, but I still find that Welsh persons on
It is an old London fairytale that there are no good restaurants in Hampstead. When the good restaurants were being handed out, Hampstead was ignored, betrayed, disgraced — given only a Carluccio’s, a Café Rouge and a quite disgusting Chinese place that has a ridiculous water feature and its own bridge. This is the story,
Sorry ‘She was sorry Doctor Cameron objected to her maternal arrangements,’ wrote Anna Maria Bennett in her seven-volume novel The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797). It is funny how fame and scandal are soon forgotten, for Mrs Bennett was a smash-hit novelist of her age. The scandal was her living for 17 years with
