Gstaad Martha Gellhorn was a long-legged blonde American writer and journalist who became Papa Hemingway’s third and penultimate wife. She got her start when H.G. Wells, then nearly 70, fell for her rather badly, advised her on her writing, and paid her a small retainer to keep him up to date on American trends. She
‘Anything you want?’ says Catriona on her way out of the house to go to the shop. I’m standing at the hob stirring a first batch of Low Life’s 2021 Pandemic Second Wave green tomato chutney. (My outdoor homegrown tomatoes stopped turning red just before Christmas.) The wooden spoon stops revolving while I google my
An everlasting lightbulb brighter than the Dog Star was installed in the street lamp outside my house one morning as I watched the two engineers being lifted up on a crane. I knew it was trouble as they took out the soft yellow bulb from the antique holder and installed a bright-white LED. I had
Dry January? Are you kidding? What dry January? I’m sorry, but I really don’t think this is the year to be considering such things. Having sought a number of opinions, the consensus was this: don’t be such an idiot, now is not the time. At Mrs Ray’s behest I did try my best, though, and
As an ambitious journalist making my way in Fleet Street, I dreamed of becoming a Mid-Atlantic Man. Tom Wolfe came up with the term in the mid-1960s to describe someone who divided his life between London and New York. Not for social reasons, but because his career required him to spend time in both cities.
Q. There is a Tube stop next door to my place of work but I now walk in each day. As I get close to the building, I often run into acquaintances who want to chat. Mary, is there an elegant way to cut short such conversations without causing offence? I can’t say that I
When Napoleon III proclaimed himself Emperor of France in 1852, he unwittingly kickstarted quality wine production in Chile and Argentina. A mass exodus of republicans ensued, one of whom happened to be a skilled agronomist from Tours named Michel Aimé Pouget. Pouget carried with him a cache of French grape cuttings that were to change
Suzanne Moore, the Telegraph columnist, found it ‘deeply annoying’ when perhaps five years ago she noticed people putting ‘Kind regards’ at the ends of emails. Her real gripe was with false claims to kindness. So what should you put at the end of an email? Yours sincerely is conventional in letters to people whom one
Keep your distance – here be dragons Agues of all kinds blown in from the East Time to fear door-knobs, be wary of cheek-to-cheek Kiss nothing, stay Within the boundaries, do what they say Soon we won’t know ourselves, bolted Behind untouchable doors, masked Like smash-and-grab merchants or terrorists Or like surgeons Bent over
After a note by Jules Laforgue The melancholy of Van Goyen’s pale autumn marines.Sad, eternal wind – life in monotone – boats loaded to tipping point, drowned banks where melancholic cattle, submerged to the knee, nose for grass – windmill struts emaciated against the hills –the little village of thatched cottages on stilts where we
You were seven and hadn’t askedfor one in months, but the salt windhad whipped your energy away,before a piled-up plate of squidat our favourite place on the promhad left you sagging in your seat. Even as I threw you overa shoulder and braced for the trudgeto our house, my back was hintingat a future without
In March last year, the world made an interesting discovery. We found that a high proportion of knowledge-work could be performed remotely. Significantly, this came as a surprise to everyone. It should be a source of mild shame that, for all their talk of innovation, very few companies or institutions had experimented with this possibility
