New York Ten years ago this week I put my money down and the American Conservative magazine was born. They say that owning a yacht is like sitting under a shower tearing up $100 bills. Owning an opinion magazine based in Washington DC is like sitting in a dull hotel room throwing $1,000 bills into
I saw a 1985 Mercedes SE 380 advertised in the classified ads of the local paper and called the number. I was more curious than anything. A ton and a half of no-expense-spared German engineering, powered by an aircraft engine, and all for the price of a top-spec iPad. You don’t see many 380s on
Some years ago, I had a boyfriend who left himself logged into his Facebook account on my computer. When I sat down at my desk after he had gone to work I was confronted with the screen he had left behind which contained a long list of messages. ‘Oo, goody,’ I thought, ‘suddenly I seem
An actor’s life can be quite hazardous. Last week, a day or two after I had seen him perform as Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens at the National Theatre, Simon Russell Beale fell over and dislocated a finger, running off the stage in agony. And last weekend my niece Anna Chancellor showed me some nasty bruises
Arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia the other night to join a cruise ship for after-dinner talks, I found I was sharing my hotel with 250 women, every one of them clad in eye-jarring combinations of red and purple. It was the annual ‘Hoot’ of the Red Hat Society, an association of ladies of 50-plus devoted,
It’s 2.43 a.m. Unable to sleep, you reach out into the night for company: literally. Out goes your arm, towards the radio on the bedside table, and you grope for the ‘on’ button. You bring the radio close to you: a hard, cold, rectangular cuddly toy with an aerial instead of ears, and you turn
Q. How do I deal with a dearly beloved wife who is beginning to display the same mildly eccentric behaviour of an aristocratic nature as her mother, also beloved by me? This week the timer went in the kitchen and my wife asked me to take off the greaseproof paper from the fillet of pork.
A Lincolnshire farmer died and went to Heaven. St Peter told him that there was a custom. Over dinner on his first evening, the new arrival would give a talk to the Heavenly Host on a great world event during his lifetime. ‘That’s easy,’ said the farmer: ‘the Lincolnshire floods in 1953.’ Peter was incredulous.
So far this year everyone has been too busy sitting in front of the television to go rioting, in England at least. But the Independent Riots Communities and Victims Panel has published its final report on why last August’s riots took place. Clearing the ground, it said: ‘We know that the rioters were not a
It’s a cheap joke, but it cheers me up. When Starbucks started that habit of asking your name and writing it on your cup, I began giving my name as ‘Chantelle’, ‘Monique’, ‘Desirée’ or ‘Pixie’. Then, when I’d collected four or five of these empty cups, I would leave them all lying around in the
