Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was Buffet’s original backer and boyfriend, later performing identical roles for Yves Saint-Laurent, turning the sensitive designer into a global ‘luxury brand’ and turning himself into one of France’s richest men with pistonnage to spare. Foulkes
There was no science before 1572, the year that Tycho Brahe saw a new star in the night sky above him. To be sure, the Greeks had made efforts to present their knowledge of nature in a systematic fashion, but they lacked the tools — more specifically they lacked the ways of thinking — that
Publishing a ‘New York’ novel in the months after 11 September 2001 is a surefire, if accidental, way to make it immediately out of date. Especially one about parking. There’s certainly a parking novel to be written in the age of global terror and suicide attackers, but it will have a more security-conscious bent than
Never mind teaching children to cook: they need to be taught to eat. Obvious? Totally, but this is the choosing part of eating, not the chomping and swallowing we are born to do. Yet, terrific survivors that omnivores have proven to be, they do not know poison from medicine unless told so. So, if you
I know it cold, the scene in the woods, the grey-toned sky, and snow— the sudden clearing in the underbrush through which a fox now steps, her auburn brush a-ziggety-zagging, as if she would erase her trail, though her tracks in the snow are already lost in the layers of snow now spackling the hemlocks,
Mei Fong tells the routine story of a girl who managed to conceal an illegal pregnancy until the baby was almost due, when family planning officials surrounded her hiding place at night. ‘She ran and ran and ran until she came to a pond. Then she ran in, until the water was at her neck.
In Competition No. 2930 you were invited to submit up to 16 lines of macaronic verse. A dictionary of poetic terms will tell you that macaronic is a verse form popularised by Teofilo Folengo, a Mantuan monk, which uses a mixture of languages, normally with a comic or satirical intent. I prefer E.O. Parrott’s elegant
Should we sell everything because Andrew Roberts (not the historian but an analyst at RBS) tells us to in the expectation of crash? Before you press the ‘sell’ button, it might just be worth reflecting on the fact that there has always been a time when some analyst somewhere has been handing out the same advice.
Cameron has a dream. And Jeremy Corbyn wants to destroy it. Our belligerent prime minister has declared war on those inner-city council estates that foster poverty, despair, unemployment, truancy, social exclusion, (and an aversion to Tory candidates). His hope is to replace these crime-ridden concrete citadels with frondy low-rise dream-homes. It sounds like Syria organised
I love the new politics. It warms my heart even on cold and gloomy winter mornings. The novelty of the always-new, freshly-minted, happy-shiny, more-decent-than-thou new politics will never fade. Consider this stirring tale from beyond the wall. The Scottish Asian Women’s Association (SAWA) was launched amidst what tradition dictates we must refer to as great fanfare at
Today, one of the greatest political journalists of my lifetime retires: Phil Webster, former political editor of The Times, is leaving the newspaper after 43 years. He has been overseeing its online political coverage for the last few years and (until a few days ago) getting up at the crack of dawn to write its morning political
Will the Tory party be able to come back together again after the EU referendum? Well, today’s PMQs suggested the reason why it should be able to. The Cameron/Corbyn clash was a classic left/right affair and by the end of it, Eurosceptics were cheering Cameron as loudly as anyone else on the Tory benches as
David Mundell, the Secretary of State for Scotland, is gay. And you know what, so what? Of course Mundell is not the first gay Tory cabinet minister, merely, it’s believed, the first to “openly” acknowledge the fact. He did so in typically low-key fashion, writing on his website: Having taken one of the most important
Dawn Butler was one of the Labour MPs who helped to get Jeremy Corbyn onto the ballot paper in the Labour leadership race. While Butler ultimately wanted Andy Burnham to be leader, she has been supportive of Corbyn since his election. Alas Butler now appears to be struggling when it comes to getting to grips
Although Quentin Letts has made it clear that his new novel The Speaker’s Wife is fictional, the satirical tome has set tongues-wagging in Westminster. Chris Bryant wrote in his Guardian review that ‘the person who is most recognisable from today’s Westminster’ is the novel’s clerk of the house — Sir Roger Richards — ‘whose real-life counterpart Sir
‘Thy choicest gifts in store / On her be pleased to pour.’ The prospect is upon Twickenham and Wembley regulars of the end of that second tricky verse. This week, Labour MPs packed into the Commons Chamber to support Toby Perkins’s English National Anthem Bill, which proposes replacing ‘God Save the Queen’ with an English
Although it may have seemed as though the majority of MPs had enough on their plates over Christmas with floods, revenge reshuffles and the war on terror, it turns out that they also had time to edit a magazine. This week’s edition of the women’s weekly Stylist is ‘made by politicians’. The issue includes a recipe for cinnamon buns
Today’s report that Len McCluskey plans to warn Jeremy Corbyn against changing Labour policy on Trident is not a surprise after the GMB’s Sir Paul Kenny used pretty fruity language to do the same on Monday. But it is significant as it shows that the plan of those in the party who do not want
Over the weekend a number of strange tweets were emitted from Jeremy Corbyn’s Twitter account. The Labour leader appeared to be taking his call to attack the Tories — and not other members of Labour — to new heights when he tweeted ‘Davey Cameron is a pie‘ along with ‘Here we… here we… here we
The Prime Minister was in a pretty ratty mood at the Liaison Committee today, taking exception especially to questions from the dry-as-sandpaper chair, Andrew Tyrie. At one point Cameron told Tyrie that ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about’ if he was suggesting that there weren’t people in Raqqa who were plotting to damage Britain.
