No use piling on where Prince Andrew is concerned. It’s a sorry business, and he’s not among the brightest either. Back in the summer of 2007, in St Tropez, I had a boatload of guests and we all went to a party given by the Rubin family in their villa. It was a very gay
After the hostel breakfast, I stood on the tropical grass lawn smoking the first fag of the day and mulled things over. For the past three days I had been pedalling my electric power-assisted bike up and down Rwanda’s green hills. I was bruised from falls, physically and mentally tired, and prone, as I always
If you were hoping to escape the bilge that’s been pumped out by supposedly neutral organs of the state during this general election campaign — the BBC, schools, the NHS — I don’t recommend going to see a pantomime. Gramsci’s long march through the institutions has finally reached the last redoubt of political incorrectness. Say
Oh those lazy, hazy, Stokesy days of summer: how long ago they seem now. When England won the cricket World Cup — or scraped it anyway — in July, and pulled off the unlikeliest of Ashes Test wins on that blazing Leeds day in August, Ben Stokes loomed as a greater certainty to be the
Q. A friend, who is very careful with his money, occasionally invites a group of six to eight out to lunch. At one such gathering, as we were reading the menus, he announced that he and his wife would just be having an omelette. A palpable silence ensued while all present tried to work out
The theme music to Legoland in Berkshire is the theme music to The Exorcist. It appears from speakers hidden in the grass. I hear it as I wander out of some un-enchanted wood filled with Lego: we have lost our ancient woods and need new ones. These ones smell slightly of drains. The Exorcist music
‘What made you chase that hare?’ asked my husband with rare geniality. John Ruskin was to blame. He asked James Russell Lowell where he found decuman, meaning ‘big wave’. The line ‘Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman’ came in Lowell’s ‘The Cathedral’ (1870) about Chartres. Lowell was Longfellow’s big-beardy successor as professor of belles-lettres at Harvard.
