When I was asked to write this article I intended to start by saying that Nigel Farage had to choose whether he preferred that Britain should leave the EU or that he should remain Ukip’s leader, because the two were incompatible. I hope I was wrong about that, but there is some truth in it,
It is said that the road to hell is ‘paved with good intentions’. Well, so is the typical front garden in what used to be our green residential streets. In the last ten years, 13 per cent of the lush greenery in British front gardens has disappeared; 4.5 million of our front gardens are now
After the first earthquake we were told that the chance of another one was 200 to 1. A fortnight later, when we were just beginning to recover, the second one hit. Perhaps I’m getting better at this, because this time I was able to control my body enough to run outside and join the crowd
Kiev ‘What the hell’s going to happen to your poor country?’ I ask the man in the flea market not far from St Sophia cathedral (Delingpole tourist rating: total must-see). ‘What do you think?’ I shrug. ‘Partition, maybe.’ The man shrugs back. We agree that what Putin is doing in the east is appalling. But
Gore Vidal once famously said that ‘Television is for appearing on, not watching.’ I feel the opposite. I’ve just turned down a financial offer from Celebrity Big Brother for this summer’s series so big it made my eyes water — and I’m not easily impressed, size-wise. Verbal people just don’t do well in such a
A doff of my flat cap to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who has been made a peer, a Treasury minister and George Osborne’s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ supremo. The metro-politan media is busy trying to find reasons why this project for improved links between northern cities plus elements of devolution is a bad idea,
In the words of one of his contemporaries ‘a man of down look, lean-faced and full of pock holes’, the 17th-century ne’er-do-well Thomas Blood sounds an unattractive proposition. His latest biographer, Robert Hutchinson, works hard to imbue him with the pantomime glamour of a lovable rogue. Hutchinson roots Blood’s rackety life firmly within the context
I hesitate ever to criticise an author for the inappropriateness of a book’s title, since it’s more likely the fault of someone in marketing, who’s had a Bright Idea. But whoever is the culprit, the omission of the dates ‘1650–1800’ from the dust jacket certainly risks annoying the bookshop browser, who may grumpily set the
Anyone who has ever listened to the thump of a rejected manuscript descending cheerlessly on to the mat can take comfort from the roller-coaster career of Barbara Pym. Between 1950 and 1961 Miss Pym (1913–1980) had published six modestly successful novels with the firm of Jonathan Cape. Then, on 24 March 1963 — ‘a sobering
Retired persons are not necessarily retiring or withdrawn although we are entitled to feel tired and/or rejuvenated by our superannuated state. In France they are en retraite or they have retreated. In Italy they are pensionati if they are lucky and in Germany Rentner. In Spain they are jubilados and in Portugal simply reformados. Happy
It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert ‘the Mad Boy’ Heber-Percy. Both gorgeous young men were known for their risky sexual escapades. What did ruffle feathers, however, was when Watson subsequently gave the Mad Boy a car. Cecil Beaton was so jealous
Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more & more from a silly but unavoidable nervous interest in the children’s movement in and out of the house’. The following year, he noted, I have no ‘interests’ at all, and marriage, he said, is ‘continually
‘Lately, the paradoxical turns of recent Russian history… have given my research more than scholarly relevance,’ remarks Oleg Khlevniuk in his introduction. Indeed, in Putin’s Russia Stalin’s apologists and admirers seem daily to become more vocal. The language of the 1930s is used in televised tirades against ‘internal enemies’ and ‘foreign agents’. Stalin himself is
We know a great deal about Samuel Johnson and virtually nothing about his Jamaican servant, Francis Barber. The few facts of which we can be certain are these: born into slavery, Barber was aged about seven when his owner, Colonel Richard Bathhurst — who may, Michael Bundock suggests here, have been his father — brought
This is not a book to be read in solitude. Not for the obvious reason that it’s frightening, but because every few lines some fascinating or unexpected fact forces you to exclaim: ‘Blimey! Listen to this …’ The three authors are American psychology professors. As young academics they were much influenced by the work of
T.H. White complained that the characters in Walter Scott’s historical novels talked ‘like imitation warming pans’: those in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, of which Flood of Fire is the final volume, talk like a whole Benares brass bazaar. As an avid reader of both Hobson-Jobson (the dictionary of Anglo-Indian slang) and Patrick O’Brian, I thought
The oceans cover seven-tenths of our planet, and although it may not seem like it above the surface, they are very busy. Helen Scales and Christian Sardet are marine biologists: Sardet is apparently known as Uncle Plankton, and those multitudes of drifting organisms — ‘plankton’ comes from the Greek planktos, meaning to wander or drift
In Competition No. 2898 you were invited to give an update on one of the children in Cautionary Tales who lived to tell the tale. Belloc’s gallery of kiddie delinquents suffered particularly unpleasant comeuppances — being eaten, feet upwards, by a lion, and so on. Of those who did escape with their lives, weepy Lord
The three main Labour leadership candidates have now all said that they want a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the EU. But the party’s ‘official’ position – that is, the policy it went into the last election with that everyone seems quite keen to disown – is that there should not be a referendum. The
Wolfgang Schäuble’s decision to link the British renegotiation to changes to the governance of the Eurozone is highly significant. In an interview the German Finance Minister told the Wall Street Journal that he has discussed George Osborne ‘coming to Berlin so that we can think together about how we can combine the British position with