Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of the Daily Telegraph.
Christopher Howse has just written a book about Soho. He drank there regularly with Michael Heath, The Spectator’s cartoon editor, in the 1980s. Last week, in the editor’s office, they remembered a vanished world. MICHAEL HEATH: I introduced you to Soho. CHRISTOPHER HOWSE: Well, I don’t know if you’re entirely to blame for that. But
Weird world In 2017: 1. Police discovered thousands of what kind of plant growing in a disused nuclear bunker in Wiltshire? 2. Cuban exiles complained about an Irish postage stamp commemorating whom? 3. Which supermarket chain apologised for an advertisement before Easter that said: ‘Great offers on beer and cider. Good Friday just
Kate Loveman’s Samuel Pepys and his Books (Oxford, £60) abounded in memorable touches: Pepys buying a Mass book in 1660 and reading it aloud late into the night ‘with great pleasure to my wife to hear that she long ago was so well acquainted with’; or Pepys writing handy memos to self: ‘Consult Sir Wm
Say so In 2016, who said: 1. ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ 2. ‘We’ve got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain. Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world.’ 3. ‘The Prime Minister — I should be pleased about this I suppose — seems to think he should be
Weird world In 2017: 1. Police discovered thousands of what kind of plant growing in a disused nuclear bunker in Wiltshire? 2. Cuban exiles complained about an Irish postage stamp commemorating whom? 3. Which supermarket chain apologised for an advertisement before Easter that said: ‘Great offers on beer and cider. Good Friday just
How did the cross, from being such a loathsome taboo that it could scarcely be mentioned, change into an image thought suitable viewing for all ages in public art galleries? There is no doubt about its early despicable reputation. A hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Cicero declared that ‘the very word cross should
During the second world war, while one brother was editing Punch as a national institution (‘Working with him was a little like helping to edit the Journal of Hellenic Studies,’ said a colleague), and another brother, given to asking questions like ‘Which way does a clock go round?’, was breaking codes at Bletchley (as an
Say so In 2016, who said: 1. ‘Brexit means Brexit.’ 2. ‘We’ve got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain. Nigeria and Afghanistan, possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world.’ 3. ‘The Prime Minister — I should be pleased about this I suppose — seems to think he should be
Say so 1. Theresa May 2. David Cameron (overheard on air, speaking to the Queen) 3. Jeremy Corbyn 4. Stephen Fry 5. President Barack Obama of the United States, warning against Brexit 6. President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines about President Barack Obama at an Asean summit 7. Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein politician 8. Hillary
Two biographies that changed my mind. Gerard Kilroy’s Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Ashgate, £80) vividly sketches the intellectual worlds of Oxford and Prague in the first half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. They were not as cut off from each other as we might suppose. Campion, one of the men who connected the two, dominated
What the Great Eastern was to Brunel, the New English Dictionary was to James Murray (1837–1915) — an unequalled task that was his life, and eventually his death. What was later known as the Oxford English Dictionary should be a ‘sweep-net over the whole surface of English literature’, said Richard Chenevix Trench, one of its
More brides in Britain go down the aisle to Gloria Gaynor’s ‘I Will Survive’ than to any other tune, Simon Loveday notes. He cannot resist adding that ‘it seems doubtful that they have fully taken in the words of the rest of the song’. That must be true. ‘I’m not that chainedup little person still
A medieval party of 800 Armenians at the top of Mount Sinai suddenly found themselves surrounded by fire. Their pilgrim staffs shone like candles but, wisely chanting ‘Kyrie Eleison’, they were relieved that after an hour or so the fire abated and not an eyelash of theirs was harmed. The top of Mount Sinai is
In his friendly and beguiling voice, Jean-Christophe Rufin explains (in a way that reminded me of the pre-journey relish of Camilo José Cela’s Journey to the Alcarria) that, before setting off on foot for Santiago de Compostela, he went to a little shop in Paris and joined the Association of Friends of St James. I
It is a curious fact that the modern Hebrew for ‘atheist’, Tim Whitmarsh notes in passing, is apikoros. The word derives from Epicurus, who set up shop as a philosopher in Athens around 306 BC, but it became so domesticated in Hebrew that the medieval thinker Moses Maimonides, till he found out better, thought it
I remember the shock, like a jolt of static electricity. One day, between taking my degree and beginning my first job, while looking through a 16th-century book about numerology that had once belonged to John Dee in the British Library, I came upon an annotation in his own neat italic hand casting up the numerical
I usually throw away dust jackets but Robin Lane Fox chose his for a reason. He originally encountered Augustine of Hippo in the spring of 1966, after lunch and his first taste of brandy, in frescoes by Benozzo Gozzoli at San Gimigniano. The quattrocento painter showed a figure with an academic air, in a gown
On the record In 2015, who said: 1. We must get the cow off the ice. 2. It’s decision time — that’s what pumps me up. 3. Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love
On the record 1. Jean-Claude Juncker 2. David Cameron 3. Sir Tim Hunt 4. Jeremy Corbyn 5. President Vladimir Putin of Russia 6. Tony Blair 7. John McDonnell (quoting Mao Tse-tung) 8. Ed Miliband 9. Lord Ashdown (They were, he didn’t) 10. Natalie Bennett, the leader of the Green Party, after giving a poor interview
‘Elms at the end of twilight are very interesting,’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal: ‘Against the sky they make crisp scattered pinches of soot.’ P.J. Kavanagh, who has died aged 84, plucked out this observation for one of the columns that he wrote for The Spectator between 1983 and 1996. He was right
