Christmas is coming, so that means presents. And for lots of us, that means scent. Some of the hopeful donors will be the sort to wander helplessly around a fragrance department, bewildered by choice until they seize, in desperation, on the stuff that looks nicely packaged. That was the route whereby my father once bought
Boris Johnson’s enemies are hoping for a final snow-down London woke to snow and people wondered whether this time Boris Johnson would show true grit. His enemies reckon there’s no business like snow business for catching him out. They trust he will be found wanting, as he was by the unexpected snowfall in February 2009,
We are at war online – and we are losing Almost exactly two years ago, an American army officer found a memory stick in a car park in the Middle East and, out of curiosity, inserted it into his military laptop. It seemed to be empty, but there are a million ways of disguising a
More women than ever are having their babies by Caesarian section. Not the old last-resort emergency type, either; the ones where mothers howl for days, to the point of peril for self or child, until mercy descends in a scalpel — life-saving, but adding to existing trauma. No. This marked increase, by as much as
What colour are hobbits, do you suppose? When I read J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, as a child, I gathered that they were very short, hirsute, quite swarthy and fairly stupid — so probably Portuguese, or at a pinch Galician. They didn’t seem to be, from the descriptions of their behaviour and living arrangements, quite — you
The law is catching up with Russia’s corrupt oligarchs Moscow’s White House is a fairly pleasing pile, at least by the standards of late Soviet architecture. Its colonnaded white stone façade enjoys handsome views over the Moscow River, and its interiors are a symphony in green malachite, light teak and gold ormolu, a mid-1990s decorating
The BBC is like a goldfish. Just as we have no way of communicating to the poor creature that it is confined by a bowl, experts of the utmost skill and renown have sought in vain for years to explain to the corporation that its ethos is slanted towards the left. It knows no other
The turbulent but often triumphant record of Britain’s royal weddings is full of lessons for Kate and William The popularity of the monarchy has been slowly improving since the Queen’s ‘annus horribilis’ speech in 1992. But the vital spark needed to win over the country was missing. Not even the Queen Mother’s 100th birthday could
Last January, Annabel Hayter, chairwoman of Gloucester Cathedral Flower Guild, received an email saying that she and her 60 fellow flower arrangers would have to undergo a CRB check. CRB stands for Criminal Records Bureau, and a CRB check is a time-consuming, sometimes expensive, pretty much always pointless vetting procedure that you must go through
Spending pleasurable hours looking for books is not like drilling for oil. Recently, however, while browsing in the excellent Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road, the black stuff spewed out like a geyser. A hardback collection of Philip Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings was on offer for £40. It wasn’t a first edition from 1964, which
Having transformed his inner-city primary, Greg Martin has bought a stately home in Sussex – and is preparing to turn it into a fully free state boarding school We’re chatting poolside, which feels somewhat incongruous since this isn’t the Riviera or a spa hotel, but a primary school in Stockwell, one of the rougher districts
On 2 July 2008 we published an article entitled “Just look what came crawling out” which alleged that at a protest at the celebration in London of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, Mohammad Sawalha had referred to Jews in Britian as “evil/noxious”. We now accept that Mr Sawalha made
No one can fault the doctors: they are using every tool available to them to save their very ill patient. But they will probably fail in their efforts to save the euro in its current form. And this will be because the regimen they originally prescribed did more harm than good. Economists were almost unanimous
The moral nadir of any state must surely have come when Mr Gerry Adams MP announces that he is its white knight. Yes, this IRA butcher and architect of countless bombings and killings is abandoning Northern Ireland politics, and even his empty seat in Westminster, to stand in Ireland’s general election next year. He actually
When the Sun ran a story saying that a council in London’s East End will investigate whether a Somali immigrant, Dahir Kadiye, scammed on his housing benefits, the point did not seem particularly newsworthy. That this was the same immigrant who had helped secure the release of Paul and Rachel Chandler after 388 days of
My husband foiled a theft at the Saatchi Gallery – and was rewarded with a night in the cells Back in October, in the same week that David Cameron was trying to persuade his party conference of the merits of the Big Society, my husband Anthony did what the Prime Minister urged and tried to
Australian cricket’s fearsome tradition of toughness may be coming to an end This is not wise. In fact, it is madness. For me, as a former professional cricketer, it is a hostage to fortune. For England, with the Ashes fast approaching, it could be worse: I am tempting fate and inviting revenge. It would be
Aung San Suu Kyi is free, but has the ruling junta won the battle for Burma’s future? Aung San Suu Kyi’s late husband, Michael Aris, was a good friend of mine at St Antony’s, Oxford. The gentlest of gentle academics, he helped establish a centre in Tibetan studies at Oxford, and converted to Buddhism. In
Driving through Gaza City last weekend, in an armoured UN land cruiser, I ask our guide what the ubiquitous green flags symbolise. ‘Hamas,’ he replies. And the black ones? ‘Jihad.’ It is almost five years since Hamas won 74 out of 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council election, in a massive rejection both of
David Cameron should have enjoyed his trip this week. Autumn is a great time to be in Beijing. The sky is deep blue, the sun hot and the evenings cool. As the season progresses, the shadows thrown by the tall buildings lengthen and the north wind from Mongolia blows a little more urgently. The pollution