Arabella Byrne is the co-author of In The Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction.
In Mary McCarthy’s 1954 novel The Group, Mr Andrews describes the contents of a charity shop (or thrift store if you hail from the States) as an ‘instructive inventory of the passé’. And indeed, all charity shops are repositories of the recent past – a perfect distillation of expended trends and fashions. Worthy of an
In 1983 Cambridge academic W.G. Runciman, reviewing Peter York and Ann Barr’s The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, described the work as an ‘anthropological survey’ in the mould of such distinguished scholars as Malinowski and Veblen. Veblen’s late-nineteenth century The Theory of the Leisure Class was, Runciman explains, an ‘earnest social-Darwinian exercise in the analysis and
To some, the sight of Prince George wearing a suit and tie at Wembley on Sunday night was simply too much. The Mum mob on Twitter roared ‘Who dresses a child like that?’ presumably hoping that the future King would be wearing a football shirt and shorts like the rest of the child population lined
Skeletons don’t always lurk in cupboards, some of them hide under dance floors waiting for a particularly rousing party to dislodge them. Such is the story of one of Napoleon’s favourite generals, César Charles Étienne Gudin de La Sablonnière, whose missing remains were discovered under a dance floor in Smolensk in 2019, over 200 years
Is there a better way to boost a politician’s fortunes than a puppy? Everyone knows that dogs buy a certain degree of political capital. Boris knew this when he acquired not simply a puppy, but a rescue cross from across the Union in Wales. Joe Biden was well aware of their political potency when he brought dogs back
Yes, we tune in for the tennis on Wimbledon fortnight. But lovers of SW19 also tune in for another kind of spectating on any given day: the sport of the Royal Box. A championship of notoriety and celebrity in its own right. Raised feudally above the Centre Court, the Royal Box has seventy-four Lloyd Loom
‘Should I pay in actual money, in-person, in the shop itself?’ I asked my husband incredulously the other day. Yes, he replied, sounding rather bored. Prior to the pandemic such an exchange would not have taken place. I would have simply gone to the shop with no thought of government restrictions to my personal liberties,
‘Like a sea beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it […] And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue – out of charity and out
There was a time when having a nervous breakdown on a tennis court was called a hissy fit. Watch John McEnroe shouting at the umpire during the 1981 Wimbledon Men’s Singles first round match against Tom Gullikson for the masterclass. Strutting over to the umpire like an angry bird, his trademark headband doing anything but
‘Dans ce rêve où ma semence de nègre fout en cloque cette chienne de Marine Le Pen.’ You don’t have to speak fluent French to get the feeling that the French-Congolese rapper Youssoupha didn’t entirely rate Marine Le Pen in his song, ‘Éternel recommencement’. In fact, he doesn’t rate quite a few journalists and politicians
News that Apple has updated its emoji range to include pictograms specific to the pandemic may either disgust you or inspire you to send a volley of missives out immediately. As an emojiste, I am in the latter camp. I am delighted that I now have a bandaged heart, a dizzy face with spiral eyes,
In October last year Emmanuel Macron had a long list of around 300 to 500 names drawn up. These were no ordinary figures but rather a number of renowned French immigrants who were being lined up as candidates for new street names and statues. Among their number was Martinican philosopher and activist Frantz Fanon, Moroccan war
François Mitterrand remains something of an enigma in French politics. Mitterrand was the original champagne socialist and he remains a poster-boy of the French left. But France’s former president – an adulterer, member of the French Resistance with a Vichy secret, secularist and sometime Catholic – doesn’t easily fit into any one box. This week marks forty years since Mitterrand
There is no greater tabula rasa in the public imagination than grief. Prince Philip’s four children – no strangers to the glare of public interest – now find themselves the target not of global ire, but rather unusually, of collective sympathy. For public figures, the warm light of communal compassion imbues recognition and significance on the lives
Pity poor Major Biden, First Dog of the United States, FDOTUS for short. Thrust first from the lowly surroundings of a shelter in Delaware then on to the porticoes of the Biden HQ and finally the White House, he appears to be experiencing teething problems as he adapts to his new life. And teeth are,
They came in their droves. Labradors, Alsatians, French bulldogs, Spaniels, Cavapoos, Cockapoos, Labradoodles, Corgis, like a roll of dog poo bags, the list goes on. No sooner had Boris locked us up in the March sunshine last year than the nation rushed to acquire a dog. After years of standing firm, parents finally gave in
Asked to defend France’s reputation on the global stage, a French diplomat once told the International Herald Tribune, ‘If Germany has Siemens, we have Voltaire.’ In this vision lies something very obviously French: a single-minded belief in superiority grounded not in the future but in the glorious intellectual past. Schooled in the tradition of exception
For all the long looks and transatlantic sniping via their courtiers, the Battle of the Dukes – Cambridge vs. Sussex – has been relatively tame thus far. No princely duel has taken place, no swords have been drawn at dawn in the grounds of Windsor Castle and, regrettably, neither Duchess has fainted at the scene.
Imagine, if you will, that there existed a television interview with Henry VIII. Sprawled in one of his Royal palaces with the interviewer nervously perched amongst the discarded chicken bones and giant dogs, what would he say? Would he be repentant about the beheadings, the adultery, the abject violence? Would he make us believe that
Rarely has the public imagination been so injected with the notion of a drug as the way out. AstraZeneca, Pfizer, BioNtech; these names have seeped into our discourse with such ease that it seems hard to imagine the shadowy time before them when vaccines were something routinely administered to children and the elderly. A time
