It felt like a stiletto jab in my liver, a pain so sharp it will take half a century to forget. Jessica Raine — aka Nurse Jenny in Call the Midwife — has shacked up with a married man, an actor and a redhead to boot. It is as if I had heard that my
To Manchester for an address to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society for the Kilburn Lecture on ‘The Future of the Olympic Games’. The learned society is Britain’s second oldest, after the Royal Society, having been instituted in 1781. John Dalton, the father of modern chemistry, was one of its important past members. My NBF
‘I was distressed to learn of some of your current problems and wanted to send you a word of encouragement. Since the time Bob Tyrrell introduced us a few years ago, I have been one of your admirers…’ This letter, dated 23 January 1985, was addressed to me and was signed by Richard Nixon. I
Gstaad The Alps are aglow as never before. A record snowfall and an abundance of sun have turned the region into a postcard of long ago. From afar, that is. Up close the cranes are ever-present, although during the season building is verboten . For the past few years I’ve been meeting three Greek childhood
Hanky-panky is American slang for doing what comes naturally. In this Valentine’s Day week, I offer you Swoon, a book about great seducers and why women love them — one I knocked off in an afternoon. Written by Betsy Prioleau, it is her second to deal with hanky-panky. (Her first, Seductress, examined history’s most powerful
Gstaad Sir Roger Moore told the Sunday Telegraph that he enjoys the slow pace of life in Switzerland. As do I. One cannot have too much of a snowy peak under a blue sky, any more than one can have too much of Schubert. Looking out from my bedroom window, all I can see are
Good for you, Clive, as in James, on your television criticism for the Telegraph. Not many people nowadays know how good a painter Gerald Murphy was. Richard E. Grant pointed this out in his programme The Riviera: A History in Pictures, and Clive praised him for it. Clive James is weak on health but very
Paris Saint-Germain-des-Prés and the Latin Quarter still evoke the verbose sophistry of Sartre, although the tourist and expensive jewellery trades have replaced the ‘rendez-vous des intellectuels’. Yet the sheer stunning beauty of the 7ème reminds one why Paris is still the most romantic capital in Europe, the city Papa Hemingway called a fine place to
Gstaad The sub-primate level of conversation, as prevalent as the snow up here in the Alps, took a turn for the better last week while a select few celebrated Prince Nicolas Romanoff’s 90th birthday. Yes, most people who live up here are illiterate, but they sure know how to count, some even up to ten
Friends who were among the last to leave Palataki at New Year tell me there were stragglers waiting to be admitted, and this was as the sun was coming up on the first day of the year. My chalet, in other words, has become the last refuge of the desperate, or among those with twice
Lanza is a noble Sicilian name which I believe appears in Il Gattopardo, Lampedusa’s immortal tale of changing times in Sicily during the 1850s. Prince Raimondo Lanza was one of Gianni Agnelli’s best friends, until he threw himself off a Roman balcony while suffering a cocaine overdose. I knew him slightly. His brother Galvano, whom
The horror at Newtown, Connecticut put a damper on the unending rounds of end-of-year parties. And that includes my own Christmas blast at the Boom-Boom room in honour of Lindsay Lohan and some of the prettiest girls in the Big Bagel. At times I think I missed my vocation: Protector-Confessor of fallen women or those
Religion is in decline, tradition takes a back seat to fashion, and same-sex marriage is now looked upon as normal. Previous taboos are accepted, such as swearing on television, and watching films about flesh-eating zombies and blood-sucking vampires feasting amidst car crashes and explosions, not to mention non-stop violence on screen. How to balance ethics
Why do so many respectable newspapers and magazines go weak at the knees the moment an unreadable autobiography of some illiterate rock star is published? I guess no hack, however literate, can resist dropped names, or perhaps it is simple hero worship, tout court, as they say in French. I’ve never read a single one,
The gossip is that the Washington Post is in bad trouble and losing money as only Tina Brown can. Not that Brown has anything to do with the Post. Tina loses zillions for Barry Diller, who finances the Daily Beast at about 10 million greenbacks a year, and is closing the 40 million per annum
Why is it that adultery can ruin a man’s career but rarely a woman’s? In so-called civilised countries, that is. (In Saudi Arabia an adulterous woman is stoned to death.) An American diplomat slated to become the next ambassador to Iraq, Brett McGurk, lost his chance because of an affair with a reporter, who is
Miami Beach To the Mecca of brutalism, a place that rivals Marbella for vulgarity, with sprawling marble-clad palaces, boxy condo blocks and concrete lumps in the place of old world, clubby wrought-iron and glass canopies. Clubs down here mean strippers and dancing poles, none of that all-white tennis garb and polite applause after a passing
By the time you read this, the longest run-up to an election will be over, thank God, and the usual bores will be pontificating over the results. The irony is that for the first time ever I couldn’t care less who won. Nothing will change in the Land of the Depraved, and Big Business will
New York Trains and buses have shut down, people have been evacuated from eastern New Jersey and the southern tip of Manhattan, and as of writing Hurricane Sandy has hit and hit hard: 65 million residents on the north-east of America have been affected, New York Hospital’s main power has blown up and seriously ill
A Greek football team has been warned it will be kicked off the field if its players wear uniforms advertising its two new sponsors. The shirts have been bright pink since the team was founded, and bear the names of local brothels ‘Villa Erotica’ and ‘Soula’s House of History’. The hypocrisy involved is mind-boggling. Football