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An 87-year-old friend, a former doctor, has been urging me for some while to have a look at the latest smart drug fad among affluent Americans, which is to go to work every day on a tiny dose of LSD. He’s an avid reader of the Scientific American and I think he must have read about it in there. He hoved into view at the Spectator Life party the other week and I turned aside from my conversation with the Hungarian ambassador to ask him whether he had managed to get hold of any yet. ‘I bought a ton of it,’ he said. (He is an enthusiast and always buys

Should I or shouldn’t I go and see The Death of Stalin, showing at the French village cinema last Sunday evening? To help me decide, I looked at what the compendious movie website Rotten Tomatoes had to say about it. The scores on the Tomatometer were disquieting. Ninety-six per cent of the 202 reviews by critics deemed it a hit, whereas only 78 per cent of 4,129 reviews posted by the general public agreed. Interesting. Normally, if a film is worth seeing, the film critics’ scores and the mob’s are roughly in alignment at 90 per cent or above. But when they differ by as much as this, one suspects

In a recent blogpost, an American economics professor called Robin Hanson asked why it is that income inequality is regarded as a terrible injustice by liberal progressives, but sex inequality — the fact that attractive people generally have more sex than unattractive people — is thought of by the same people as an unalterable fact of life that no one should complain about. ‘One might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organising around this identity,’ he wrote. Hanson was prompted to ask this question by last week’s Toronto van

Pig’s trotters. Lamb’s feet stuffed with their brains. Flayed wild rabbits, all sinew, muscle and eyeballs. Nude chickens with flopping heads, gaping beaks and scaly feet. A pig’s head with curling eyelashes lowered demurely. A tray of minced horse flesh. Our favourite shop window. The French, eh? Would we like the head on or off, asked the butcher when we went in and asked him for one of his chickens. I consulted briefly with Oscar. We thought off. On would have been thrilling, but we wanted to see a French butcher cut a chicken’s head off. He positioned the chicken’s neck on his block and severed it with a nonchalant

A week ago I plucked my eight-year-old grandson Oscar from the bosom of his rumbustious young family and took him on an orange aeroplane to Nice, and from there up into the hills of the upper Var to spend 11 days in our breeze-block shack. His second visit. On his first, last August, the temperature hit 45 degrees Celsius and we were roasted alive. This one, though, was relentlessly cold and wet and the mop and bucket were in constant use in the living room. Confined to barracks, we played Dobble, a card game akin to snap, but more complicated and requiring sharper wits. Several games of Dobble revealed beyond

A pair of anti-terrorism officers watched us check through into the boarding lounge. They stood behind the easyJet woman and took us in as we came through. One was about 30, the other about 40; both hard as nails. The younger did the Speedy Boarders; the other the common herd. What was remarkable about them, apart from their being there at all, was their Zen-like stillness and the slow economy of their eye movements. The check-in desk was a maelstrom of anxiety and pocket fumbling and the easyJet woman was working both queues like an acrobat. And there, just beyond, were these two very still individuals who appeared to be

On Wednesday, two striking events happened in France. The first was that the President of the Republic led the nation’s mourning for Lieutenant-Colonel Beltrame, the policeman who swopped himself for a hostage at the siege at a supermarket in Trèbes last week. Elsewhere in Paris on the same day there was a silent march past the flat of Mireille Knoll. As a girl, in 1942, Mme Knoll narrowly escaped being rounded up by the French police and put on a train to Auschwitz. Last weekend, at the age of 85, the remains of her wheelchair-bound body were found in her Paris flat. Her body had been stabbed and burned. Mme

I go to the theatre but rarely because I am overpowered by even mediocre acting and find it exhausting. Theatre has the same effect on me, I imagine, as the Great Exhibition must have had on a Dorset peasant with a cheap-day return on the newly opened Great Western Railway. But by what strange magic does an actor transcend his or her everyday persona and convincingly dissemble an altogether different, fictional one? Is it the training? Or a gene — Romany, perhaps? Or are actors afflicted by a peculiar personality disorder in which part of the brain is either overdeveloped or missing? For a newspaper article, I once rehearsed with

During the past three years I have spent quite a bit of time in a rented house in Provence. Volets Bleus is a rectangular breeze-block bungalow perched on the side of a hill. In front of it is a tiled south-facing terrace resting on concrete pillars. The terrace looks over the tops of the trees that grow out of the valley floor, and further out over a commercial vineyard, and then to a distant line of oak-forested hills. Our nearest neighbours are a Dutch couple who live in a pretty old property a quarter of a mile away and high above us, currently on the market for €1.2 million. Kukor