It’s June, and the country-house summer opera festivals are now in full swing. Glyndebourne, which opened the season last month, has now been joined by its leading emulators — Garsington in Oxfordshire, The Grange in Hampshire and Longborough in Gloucestershire; and next month a newcomer, Winslow Hall Opera in Buckinghamshire, will be putting on La
I’ve been reading Fire and Ashes, Michael Ignatieff’s account of his disastrous foray into politics, in an attempt to understand where it all went wrong for Ed Miliband. In combination with the election postmortems and interviews with the people in Miliband’s inner circle, it’s extremely illuminating. For those unfamiliar with his story, Ignatieff is a
I wrote last week about a swarm of bees that had attached itself to a wall of my house, as if this were a rare and momentous event; but since then there have been three more swarms, and the men in spacesuits have been back again to remove them. Well, they’ve actually removed only two
In his Memoirs, Kingsley Amis includes a story about meeting Roald Dahl at a party in the 1970s. Dahl advises him to write a children’s book — ‘That’s where the money is’ — and brushes aside his objection that he doesn’t think it would be any good. ‘Never mind, the little bastards’d swallow it,’ he
Getting to Goodwood last Saturday was an achievement in itself. On the Bank Holiday weekend I calculated a cross-country route from Oxfordshire to avoid the traffic. All went well until my satnav threw a hissy fit at my variations. Its female voice, that of an eager hockey mistress contemplating a career change to dominatrix, instructed
From reading the newspapers you might get the impression that honeybees were on the way to extinction. In Europe, it is said, the number of honeybee colonies has fallen in a few years by a quarter. In the United States, it has halved since the 1940s. Nobody knows exactly why. The experts blame any number
I couldn’t believe it when Nicola Sturgeon called for the resignation of Alistair Carmichael, the former Scottish Secretary, over his role in the leaked memo affair. As readers will recall, the Daily Telegraph published a confidential document during the election campaign that purported to be an account of a conversation between Sturgeon and Sylvie Bermann,
I have rather a poor record for speeding over the years. I have been caught by cameras quite often, sometimes getting points on my licence and paying modest fines, and twice avoiding further points by attending speed-awareness courses to be educated in the dangers that speeding can cause. It has all sort of worked; I
I was disappointed to hear Andy Burnham on Marr last Sunday declare his opposition to free schools. He put plenty of distance between himself and Ed Miliband, even admitting Labour spent too much in the run-up to the recession, which is quite something given that he was the Chief Secretary to the Treasury at the
Back on political duty with CNN in election week, I came across a dead rat in Downing Street. It had to be an omen, but had the rodent been leaving or arriving when he met his fate, presumably in the jaws of the lean-looking fox who loped across the No. 10 doorstep shortly afterwards? Perhaps
On election day I was in Puglia in the ‘heel’ of Italy, where interest in British politics could hardly be lower. One local news website that I consulted appeared to give higher priority to the fact that Italian penis-enlargement operations had increased by 20 per cent during the past year than to the electoral bombshell
After I failed my O-levels and decided to leave school, my father suggested I go to Israel to work on a kibbutz. I’m not sure why he thought this would cure me of my self-righteous adolescent narcissism, but it worked. I returned to England determined to go back to school and make something of myself.
It’s more than four months now since my 75th birthday, but I’m still waiting for a ‘cold call’ from the NHS to ask if I have ‘thought about resuscitation’. This is what the Daily Mail warned me last week that anyone over 75 might now receive. As it so happens, I do quite often think
I appeared on Radio 4 a couple of weeks ago to discuss the age-old question of whether political satire is dead. I don’t think it is, but it has lost a good deal of vitality in recent years and the role of satire in the general election campaign is a case in point. There has
At Sandown Park last Saturday an era ended. Twenty thousand of us turned up to cheer on Tony McCoy as he took his last two mounts and collected his 20th trophy as champion jumps rider. We cheered, we clapped, we decided there was nothing to be ashamed of about a certain moistness of eye, noting
I remember the first time that someone stood up and offered me a seat on the London Underground. It was in 2002, when I was 62 years old, and rather a pretty girl whom I had been quietly admiring through the crush on the Piccadilly Line suddenly rose to her feet and beckoned me to
A couple of weeks ago I returned to my old Oxford college for a ‘gaudy’ — posh, Oxford-speak for a reunion. This one was for those of us who came up to Brasenose in 1983, 1984 and 1985. That group includes the Prime Minister but, not surprisingly, he wasn’t there. I imagine he didn’t want
There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the second child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. It is hardly a very exciting event. Babies are born all the time, and there are already quite enough descendants of the Queen to ensure the
Not a day passes when I don’t look on my father’s record with shock and awe. I’m not talking about his authorship of Labour’s 1945 manifesto, his invention of the word ‘meritocracy’ or his creation of the Open University. I’m talking about the fact that he fathered a child at the age of 80. How
No sooner had I written last week’s column about the sad disappearance of the two tortoises in my care than they suddenly showed up. The sun had shone for two days, and that was enough to bring them out from underground. I had become convinced that I would never see them again. They had vanished
