As a late Seventies teenager, I was exposed to two distinct brands of American humour — or ‘yomour’ as it tended to be pronounced — each diametrically opposed to the other. One was the Bob Hope school of urbane wisecrackery that drifted over the Radio Two airwaves on Saturday mornings while my father sat approvingly
According to Bill Bryson, 99.9 per cent of the world’s ills originated in America during the 1950s. Well, he doesn’t actually say that, as such, but in the course of his book he reveals some pretty grisly statistics concerning his homeland. Apparently, chemicals in food, endless nuclear-bomb testing, teenagers, intensive television- watching, American world domination,
The late Leonard Setright was a rightly admired, genuinely idio- syncratic, provocatively pedantic and engagingly discursive motoring writer who loved any excuse to show off his Latin or to get Milton, Mozart or Ecclesiastes into a car column. He relished his reputation for having been quoted more often than anyone else in Private Eye’s Pseuds’
One of the lessons taught in these pages over many years by Christopher Fildes was that, because financial markets are human nature in action, anything that goes wrong in them is almost certain to have happened before and highly likely to happen again. Technology may advance, the language and methods of business may evolve, the
‘Kings, who are the sovereign arbiters of the fortune and the conduct of men, are always themselves the most severely judged and the most curiously observed.’ Louis XIV complained in his memoirs (addressed to his son) about the public gaze in which monarchs lived, and the malicious gossip to which they were always therefore subject:
Over the coming weeks you are sure to hear a good deal about The Thirteenth Tale. The author of this novel, a teacher of French literature living in Harrogate, has already netted 1.5 million pounds in advance royalties from British and US publishers alone. Foreign deals and film rights will surely garner much more. Comparisons
Replace the commas in the subtitle of this book, ‘Thomas Young, the Anonymous Polymath who Proved Newton Wrong, Explained How We See, and Deciphered the Rosetta Stone Among Other Feats of Genius’, with exclamation marks, and it reads like the title of a Gillray cartoon or the patter of a circus huckster. The problem we
My Love Affair with Miami Beach (1991) by Isaac Bashevis Singer Isaac Bashevis Singer, the 1978 Nobel laureate, wrote mainly on the Jewish experience in pre-war Poland, the Holocaust, Israel, and the diaspora to the USA, particularly New York, not an awful lot about Miami Beach. But Miami Beach nevertheless held a special place in
