Why, despite his devoted fans, Grigory Sokolov won’t play live in Britain Grigory Sokolov is a pianist in his fifties; he is overweight, Russian, sleeps only three or four hours a night, is a strict vegan and is obsessed with the occult. He can calculate with one glance the number of seats in an empty
The international stage is dominated by two men this March: Muammar Gaddafi, fighting like mad for the survival of his regime, and Mikhail Gorbachev, celebrated around the world on his 80th birthday for not being a Gaddafi. Nobody knows what will now happen in Libya; but the Gorbachev celebrations will culminate next week in a
Thrilling as the race was, last week’s Cheltenham Gold Cup will leave an even more remarkable legacy: the winning jockey, Sam Waley-Cohen, did it as an amateur. Being a jockey isn’t his day job — he is the CEO of a dental business — and he races for love, not money. It’s not supposed to
With oil trading at more than $100 a barrel, Abu Dhabi holds a jackpot-winning ticket in the lottery of life. The emirate sits on reserves of nearly 100 billion barrels, about 9 per cent of the world’s proven supply. At today’s pumped-up price, its subterranean treasure is worth at least $10 trillion. That’s $10,000,000,000,000.Abu Dhabi
Marine Le Pen is the new, friendly face of French extremism – and suddenly, she’s leading in the polls There are just 13 months to go until the French presidential election and Le Phénomène Marine Le Pen, as it is called here, is getting spooky. Not so long ago, the 42-year-old daughter of Jean-Marie, now
It was meant to be a routine budget. Now Osborne looks like the government’s last chance ‘The Cameron project is worth saving’, a government insider said to me recently. It was a striking declaration. After ten months in government, the people on the inside are not talking about a bumpy start or a rough patch.
Becoming a dad past retirement age isn’t miraculous, it’s just selfish He isn’t the first and he won’t be the last. But lack of originality was clearly the least of Donald Trelford’s concerns as he commandeered acres of Sunday newsprint to boast of the arrival of his baby son, Ben. Mr Trelford is, if you
Will Cameron play the Bush to Obama’s Blair? Eight years ago an American president led a passive British prime minister into a war both countries would regret. David Cameron is eager for history to repeat itself, with the national roles reversed. While Barack Obama dithers, Cameron demands tough action against Libya — with a western-imposed
Is this the end for the British National Party? I know that sentence reads like one of those headlines in the Daily Mail to which the answer is always no, like ‘Do tramps give you cancer?’ But things are nonetheless looking a little grim for that doughty and loveable band of white supremacists who, the
A strange calm followed Friday’s earthquake It is eerily quiet this evening. I hear no traffic, no wind, not even the birds. It’s hard to believe that Tokyo has been in a state of emergency for four days, following earthquake, tsunami and radioactive leaks. I was at home alone on Friday at 2.45 p.m., in
It’s tribal and religious divisions that really shape the Middle East – and that account for the Saudi intervention in Bahrain I once got lost in Asir, the mountainous region on Saudi Arabia’s southwestern border with Yemen. This was the home of many of the terrorists on September 11, from the million-strong al-Ghamdi tribe. But
I recently had to write the final section of a book. It wasn’t very long — 500 words or so, about half the length of this article — and an imminent train journey seemed the ideal opportunity. No laptop accompanying me, but that didn’t matter: as an exercise in nostalgia I would write the words
Prince Andrew’s follies have shown the royal family who its friends are To enemies of the monarchy, Prince Andrew presents the perfect target. He has an array of vices: a love of the high life, a weakness for unsavoury company, a painfully short list of achievements and a talent for finding his way into newspapers.
Kate Middleton, it has been widely suggested, could one day be Britain’s first middle-class queen: mother a former air hostess, grandfather in the RAF. But her ancestors had starring roles in the great royal drama that was the Tudor dynasty’s century of power. In fact, it turns out that Henry VIII is almost certainly Kate
To what problem is the statutory regulation of herbalists a solution? Are the tiny bits of bark and sap and leaf peddled by contemporary wisewomen deleterious to human health? Are we at risk of being sterilised by St John’s wort, paralysed by pau d’arco, maddened by meadowsweet? Hardly. Herbal remedies might be inert placebos or
What a pleasure to welcome back into our newspapers that grasping porcine ginger trollop, Sarah Ferguson. It is money, of course, which has seen her return to media prominence; perpetually skint as a consequence of her fabulously extravagant lifestyle and sense of entitlement, she allowed her incalculably thick ex-husband, Prince Andrew, to fix up a
After 100 International Women’s Days, real achievement still trumps leftist ideology Nothing illustrates better the difference between political idealism and political realism than the campaign to advance women in power, now a century old. The idealists insist on universal principles, based on rights theory, which benefit all women equally. Realists grasp the point that gifted
Even at the time, I knew it was a deal with the devil. Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, commanding officer of the Welsh Guards and a friend of mine from the late 1990s, had just been killed in Afghanistan. He was the first battalion commander to die in action since the Falklands. Colleagues of his were
Ireland’s woes make themselves felt in Cheltenham The bookmaker Paddy Power summed it up: ‘Cheltenham is the best craic you can have and if you cannot look forward to it you need to have your doctor check you are still alive.’ For the Irish the Cheltenham Festival, which starts next week, is more than just
Just over two years ago, Barack Obama delivered a calculated insult to Britain. He returned the Epstein bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to America by the British government as a token of solidarity following the September 11 terrorist attacks. Churchill had pride of place in the Oval Office between 2001 and
