In her early days on Fleet Street, Mary Kenny, as she herself admits, was cast as ‘the wild Irish girl’, and did her best to live up to it. She held her own with the drinkers at El Vino’s, gave new meaning to the phrase ‘talking about Uganda’ when discovered in flagrante with an African
Journalists’ memoirs tend to be as transitory as the great stories they so lovingly recall. Journalists’ memoirs tend to be as transitory as the great stories they so lovingly recall. Even the best of them — Arthur Christiansen’s Headlines All My Life, Otto Friedrich’s Decline and Fall, about the death of the Saturday Evening Post,
Mrs Noyce kept on being prosecuted, appearing immaculately clad on her many court appearances. But she carried on, keeping her thoughts to herself. She probably echoed the complaint of another madam, Margaret Sempill, in the 19th Century: when she was accused by the Kirk of keeping prostitutes — in particular the very pretty Katherine Lenton,
This is a book from beyond the grave — the last that Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, and though it is unfinished, there is no mistaking the sting in the tale. There was nothing the Regius Professor of History at Oxford enjoyed more during his lifetime than annoying the Scots. From time to time he would break
At the Edinburgh Book Festival this year, Dr David Starkey, the television historian and iconoclast, pronounced that history was elitist – it was about kings and queens and power-brokers rather than the marginal or the dispossessed. He liked big and important subjects. He was uninterested in peasants. Neal Ascherson, by contrast, is deeply interested in