London

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

How clever are ravens? I asked at the Tower

On Tower Hill, by the east wall of Beauchamp Tower where Robert Dudley was imprisoned for a year, a raven called Merlin hides behind a yucca plant. I know she’s there because the Ravenmaster told me. He knows she’s there because Merlin (a female) and he are bonded and they keep tabs on each other throughout the day. As he walks across Tower Green, he whistles to her, and in reply, from the shadows, comes a low, metallic, caw. Ravens pair up for life, for the most part, and Merlin, who dislikes the other ravens, has chosen Chris, the Tower of London’s Yeoman Warder Ravenmaster, as her mate. As he

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Some like it posh

Daphne’s serves Italian food in South Kensington. (I like the name because Daphne was the name Jack Lemmon chose for his female self in Some Like It Hot, although Tony Curtis — Josephine — wanted to call him Geraldine. I know no one else called Daphne, and I do not need to. Lemmon sated me.) This district, you may recall, is currently a building site, as residents try to dream their houses bigger and their noses smaller; it is a tangle of cranes, personal trainers, tax avoidance, lipstick, adultery and Ferraris swamped with parking tickets. And so Daphne’s, which was a 1980s mini-series restaurant wrought from assorted Nigel Dempster columns

Emily Rhodes

Words on the street

A white van pulls up outside St Giles in the Fields, an imposing 18th century church in central London, around the corner from Tottenham Court Road station, for a couple of hours every Saturday afternoon. St Giles is known as ‘The Poets’ Church’ because it has memorials to Andrew Marvell and George Chapman, but this humble van makes the nickname more fitting. It’s a library. To be homeless is to have no fixed address, which means you can’t borrow books from a public library — but it doesn’t mean you’ve no desire to read. Quaker Homeless Action set up this mobile library in 1999, making runs into London twice a

Wednesday

Steerpike

Conference party round-up: Theresa’s kiss is put on hold

After four days of speeches and panels at Tory conference, there is now at least a little consensus over what Brexit means Brexit means and much concern over the quality of Philip Hammond’s jokes. However, while a number of conference speeches proved dry, Mr S is glad to report that the after hours soirees were free-flowing. At the Sun‘s conference party — where guests were offered teetotal May Day cocktails — tributes were paid to two men who were unable to make it to Birmingham this year. The paper’s editor Tony Gallagher recalled what David Cameron and George Osborne had said to him ahead of the paper backing Brexit. ‘David and George took us aside

Friday

Ed West

Foreign investors aren’t to blame for London’s housing crisis

I hate gentrification; my area was so much cooler when there were people openly selling drugs on the high street, my neighbours’ house had a mattress outside and the nice restaurants needed bouncers so the diners weren’t constantly harassed by crack addicts. Now it’s all just nice coffee shops, other broadsheet readers and arthouse cinemas. But don’t worry, for the Mayor of London is on the case, launching an inquiry into how much London land is being bought up by overseas investors and, as the Guardian reports, ‘the scale of gentrification and rising housing costs in the capital‘. Sadiq Khan says there are ‘real concerns’ about the surge in the number of homes

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Pens, sex and potatoes

I hoped that Bronte would be filled with Victorian writers licking ink off their fingers and bitching about Mrs Gaskell being a third-rate hack; but it is not to be. (Do not think I am vulgar. My description is accurate. Wuthering Heights is a rude novel, and Jane Eyre is worse. St John Rivers, its Christian Grey, is surely a Spectator subscriber). It is, instead, a finely wrought and glossy restaurant off Trafalgar Square, designed, I suspect, for advertising executives. It used to be the Strand Dining Rooms but it died and now there’s this. It is named for Horatio Nelson, the Duke of Bronte. His title, it is believed,

Will Cohu

The fallen Angel

Ashraf Marwan was an Egyptian-born businessman, a son-in-law to Nasser and a political high-flyer in the administration of Sadat, who fell off the balcony of his flat in Carlton House Terrace, central London, in June 2007. His death was watched with incredulity by business colleagues assembled in an office across the road, who recalled seeing two burly, possibly Middle-eastern figures framed in the tableau. Investigations were inconclusive. Marwan, then in his sixties, wasn’t well, but hadn’t seemed suicidal. On the other hand, he had been afraid, and with good reason, because plenty of people wanted him dead. Marwan had been a spy. That seems to be the most concrete element

Ian Sansom

All work, many plays

‘Krapping away here to no little avail,’ writes Beckett to the actor Patrick Magee in September 1969. To ‘no little avail’, note, not to ‘little or no’: there is a difference. It’s the difference that Beckett makes — I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and all that. This final volume of Beckett’s letters contains much krapping away to both no little and little or no avail. ‘Perhaps my best years are gone,’ remarks Krapp in the play, ‘But I wouldn’t want them back.’ Well, here they are, like it not: 9,000 pages of letters whittled down to just under 800 pages of text by a quartet of editors —

Wednesday

Steerpike

Conference party round-up: Corbyn-mania hits Liverpool

As Labour conference draws to a close for another year, over the past four days there has been plenty of drama played out in both the conference hall and the fringe events. However, the after hours soirees have also proved eventful. At Sky News‘s bash, attendees got to choose whether they were a champagne socialist or a prosecco socialist thanks to a well-stocked bar. While Owen Smith was nowhere to be seen at the event — perhaps still smarting from his leadership defeat — he can take heart that he was deemed important enough to have his face decorate a cupcake. Alas, out of the four cake options available — Smith, Jeremy Corbyn,

Thursday

Laura Freeman

The Victoria and Albert

Thomas Hardy, while still married to his first wife Emma, but arranging assignations in London with Florence, his second-wife-to-be, used to ask her to meet him at the Victoria and Albert Museum by the great, towering plaster cast of Trajan’s column. Really, Thomas? Trajan’s column? How obvious can a man be? Knowing what I know about Hardy’s column, and with the added burlesque of the modesty fig leaf that was cast for Michelangelo’s plaster David, I cannot now keep a straight face in the Cast Courts at the V&A and have to take myself off upstairs to look at silver salt-shakers the minute I get the sniggers. What a lot

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

A free vote on the Heathrow runway? Don’t be so wet, Prime Minister

Hinkley Point — for all its flaws and the whiffs of suspicion around its Chinese investors — has finally received Downing Street’s blessing. Meanwhile, ministers hold the party line that High Speed 2 will go ahead according to plan, backed by news that the project has already bought £2 billion worth of land; and investors hunt for shares in the construction sector that might benefit from the multi-billion-pound infrastructure spree widely expected in Chancellor Philip Hammond’s autumn statement. But still no decision on a new airport runway for London — the one piece of digger work, short of tunnelling under the Atlantic, that would signal Britain’s raging post-Brexit appetite for

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The miracle of Hong Kong

Since he moved to Hong Kong three years ago, the Rat’s Cantonese has been coming on apace. This has rather less to do with his language skills — never that much in evidence on his school reports — than it does with the fact that my stepson works in what is still, despite the mainland Chinese’s best efforts, one of the most aggressively free-market cultures in the world. ‘It’s like this,’ Rat explained, when the Fawn and I visited earlier this year. ‘If you want to get a cab somewhere urgent in the morning and you can’t speak good enough Cantonese then basically you’re stuffed. The drivers just swear at

Wynn Wheldon

My mother, my self

To tell this story of his search for a mother lost to mystery in early infancy, its author uses the techniques of documentary drama. He describes past scenes and conversations in extreme, atmospheric detail: a particular dream on a particular night in the 1940s, a conversation in the 1950s. Perhaps his work as a screenwriter has helped in this, but it is the clarity of his prose and the emotional significance of his search that ensure an entirely plausible imaginative reconstruction. As one would in reviewing a novel, the characters may be described in the present tense. So George, the author’s father, Anglo-French, hailing from the Seychelles, Catholic, a keen

Thursday

The Spectator

Fire in the sky

From ‘The burning of the Zeppelin’, The Spectator, 9 September 1916: Half London formed the vast proscenium for this tragedy of the air, and saw on the aerial stage the triumph of right over might — saw with their natural eyes David smite Goliath and hurl him in flaming ruin to the ground. Never before in human history had men sat in such a theatre and seen such a curtain rung down from the starry heights above them. But what made this drama of the open Heaven memorable above all record was the cheer that greeted its close. Those who had the inexpressible good fortune to hear that soul-shaking sound

Bruce Anderson

Grouse rules

The autumn bank holiday is like the five-minute bell at the opera. The shades of the prison house loom. All over the country, kids are looking for missing kit while mothers are trying to remember where they put the Cash’s name tapes — after they have made sure that the grindstone is in working order. Interrogation is certain to reveal holiday tasks incomplete: holiday reading well short of the final page. But there are compensations. The last chores of summer can be palliated by the first fruits of autumn. On Holland Park Avenue — I suppose you could call it South-West Notting Hill — there is a delightful enclave with

Anna Aslanyan

Digging deep into history

The year is 1963. A girl is walking around Stepney with a pack of index cards, visiting old residents in their dilapidated houses, drinking strong tea with tinned milk, listening to their stories of happy days past and looking at cracked walls and leaking roofs. As she promises them help on behalf of her employer, the Old People’s Welfare Association, redevelopment plans for the area are being drawn up with little regard for its inhabitants, many of whom don’t want to move. ‘There may be heartbreak in store for some,’ breezily remarks a magazine article. That girl was Gillian Tindall, and her interest in ‘the landscape of people’s lives’ has

Sunday

Alec Marsh

London’s old elite is discovering how it feels to be priced out

‘Super-rich foreigners are “forcing” the old money elite out of London’s prime postcodes.’ So declares London’s Evening Standard newspaper – confirming what the rest of us knew anyway. Indeed it was in the Spectator three years ago that I pointed out that central London was turning into Venice – a zombie city devoid of actual life with absentee foreign owners undermining its identity. The lights aren’t on and no one’s at home, because they’re in Monaco or Dubai or Shanghai. And now, thanks to a new report, we all – including even the Evening Standard’s property correspondent – know it’s true. According to Dr Luna Glucksberg of the International Inequalities Institute (good

Thursday

Tom Holland

Diary – 1 September 2016

European unions come and go. Back in 1794, one of the more improbable ones was founded when Corsica joined Britain as an autonomous kingdom under the rule of George III. It didn’t last long, and by 1796, after an ignominious Brexit from the island, the Corsicans once again found themselves under French rule. Today, the episode is chiefly remembered for the injury sustained by one particular officer during the initial British capture of the island: it was during the siege of Calvi that Nelson lost the sight in his right eye. ‘Never mind,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘I can see very well with the other.’ Naturally, as an appalling

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Real legs and fake people

The Soho Hotel is an actors’ hotel. They come for press junkets and interviews that reveal nothing because there is nothing to reveal; in fact, I have long suspected that this consuming nothingness, screamed across newsprint with all the conviction of denial, is the point of them; anything to evade reality and bring forth the realm of stupid. So it doesn’t matter that the Soho Hotel doesn’t know what it is; that is a benefit, quite possibly a design. Actors don’t know who they are either, and this is why they feel comfortable in the Soho Hotel. It is another mirror. It is part of the Firmdale Group, which has

Dot Wordsworth

Taxi

Old Quentin Letts was on the wireless the other day asking ‘What’s the point of the London black cab?’ Between much shouting from my husband (a sign he is paying attention) I heard an old cabby explain that the word taxi came from its German inventor, whose name was Thurn und Taxis. Really! There is no defeating this blunder, which is all over the internet. In reality taxi came into English from the French taximètre (1905), where the first element represents taxe, ‘tariff’. Taxis are hackney carriages. Autodidact cab-drivers cite an origin from Middle Dutch, in which an ambling horse was called hackeneie. But why did the Dutch call it