Goody goody gumdrops! The Donald has pardoned Lord Black and I couldn’t be happier. Conrad got a bum deal and spent three and a half years behind bars for charges I always believed to be phoney, most of which were overturned. Never mind. One can’t get back the years wasted in a cell for as
The mental fruit of yet another sleepless night was that my mother was determined to arrange her funeral as quickly and as cheaply as possible. A friend had told her, she said, that the Co-op do a version called a ‘Simple Funeral’ for less than £2,000. Please would I look it up on the internet
‘Farewell then, little lodger. I wish you would stay for ever but I understand that girls in their early twenties meet boys and go off to live with them in flatshares in Tooting. I had such a soft spot for her, the builder boyfriend nicknamed her ‘mini-me’. I taught her to ride and would pull
Newbury is as fair a test for a racehorse as you can get with its galloping track and a wide-open finishing straight that minimises hard-luck stories. It also gets the little things right: in contrast to the skimpy offerings from places such as Kempton Park, last Saturday’s racecard was a model, containing details in colour
We’ve not had an offer from Messrs Corney & Barrow in a while and it’s a treat to welcome them back to these pages, especially since they come wafting such scrumptious bottles under our beaks. There’s much to enjoy here as we head into supposed summer and I trust you’ll take advantage of the fabled
The politics professor Matthew Goodwin made an interesting observation on Twitter this week. He pointed out that many of the characteristics of the ‘paranoid style’ in American politics — a phrase coined by Richard Hofstadter to describe right-wing populists such as Barry Goldwater — apply to left-wing anti-Brexit campaigners. They are convinced that the 2016
Q. Was I right to feel aggrieved when, having contributed a bottle of fine champagne to a small supper party, I clocked the host stashing it away, only to serve something far inferior? Commenting would have been naff, but had I known that was this gentleman’s style, I wouldn’t have taken such a nice bottle.
A book, a bottle, a bower set in an ancient garden: you think that if you walked round the right corner, there would be England, putting manure on the roses. Kipling reminds us that gardening is hard work and that beauty depends on bent backs. True enough, but they also serve who only sit and
‘Is it like a packet of fags?’ asked my husband, less annoyingly than usual, but still in some confusion. I had been telling him why a book was like a sarcophagus, which I admit has the ring of a Victorian riddle. It has long been accepted that book shares the same derivation as beech. I
People sometimes ask what slogan could have swayed the Brexit vote: the opposite of the touchstone phrase ‘Take back control’. There are many suggestions, my own being: ‘Don’t leave — it’s what the French want us to do.’ No Europhile committee would ever have approved a jingoistic slogan, of course; yet the feelings of committed
