Athens As everyone knows, Sigmund Freud was a fraud. And, like many frauds, he thought the Parthenon might also be one. But he summoned his nerve and visited the sacred site and was delighted as well as shocked at what he saw. This was 1904. Like other visitors, Freud dreaded that the real thing might
I was in Ypres, about which Churchill said, ‘A more sacred place for the British race does not exist in the world.’ Thousands of members of that race were knocking about in the town. We were easy to spot among the more prosperously dressed Belgians. But not always. I said bonsoir to this bloke who
I’m not exaggerating. There used to be a lovely big Books Etc on Victoria Street where you could lose yourself for an hour and find all sorts of unexpected treasures: while browsing in the sports section there I bought a copy of Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand, which had me in tears after ten minutes. But
In every generation, there are at least two famous gardeners who inspire universal respect, if not necessarily affection, in their contemporaries. From the 1870s they were William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, in Edwardian times Reginald Farrer and E.A. Bowles, in the post-war period Vita Sackville-West and Graham Stuart Thomas, and, since the 1970s, Christopher Lloyd
They have been racing over this patch of the Sussex Downs since 1802. King Edward VII, who popularised both the panama and the linen suit, called it ‘a garden party with racing tacked on’. For me, it is Ascot without the excess. Goodwood’s stands with their floating canopies don’t look like a concrete imposition on
It’s the summer and that means the festival season is upon us. I say that as if I’m a veteran of the festival circuit when, in fact, the last one I went to was Hood Fayre (sic) in Totnes in 1980. That was the year I took my O-levels and I remember sitting in a
Q. Next month my husband and I are taking guests for a week on a boat in Turkey. They are people we do not know very well. Since a lot of our guests are Americans they will not be drinking very much and I wonder if you can suggest any ways in which we might
Nick Clegg agrees with Cardinal de Retz: ‘Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif’ — there is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment. Nick Clegg agrees with Cardinal de Retz: ‘Il n’y a rien dans ce monde qui n’ait un moment decisif’ — there is
