Q. My 50th birthday is looming and I am hosting a small dinner in a restaurant. This has proved challenging as I have at least 40 people I like but can only ask 25. However, of those I have already asked, ten are still hedging with ten days to go. If these A-listers would just
Indian Accent is an Indian restaurant in Albermarle Street, deepest Mayfair, on the site of Rohit Khattar’s Chor Bizarre (‘thieves market’). It follows branches in New York and New Delhi, which featured at no. 9 in the 2016 Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants List, sponsored by S. Pellegrino and Acqua Panna. Apparently you have to mention that,
I sat up with a jerk, after contemplating the wallpaper in the television dramatisation of The Woman in White, when a character wondered aloud if he was paranoid. Paranoid? How could he be? The novel was finished by 1860 and paranoid was not invented till 1902 (in a translation of a book by the psychiatrist
New York Talk about high life this is not. I smelled a rat long ago, but then the scent got weaker and weaker. Now it’s back — and stronger than ever. I’m talking here, of course, about the Saudis, the Qataris and the son-in-law who has also risen, Jared Kushner. Almost a year ago the
Should I or shouldn’t I go and see The Death of Stalin, showing at the French village cinema last Sunday evening? To help me decide, I looked at what the compendious movie website Rotten Tomatoes had to say about it. The scores on the Tomatometer were disquieting. Ninety-six per cent of the 202 reviews by
The first time I saw a woman leading a horse down the lane on a lead, both she and it dressed from head to foot in high viz, she in a crash helmet and safety vest, I thought nothing of it. But that was a good year ago now, and since then the increasing number
I suppose, given the income and the opportunity to indulge, you could eventually tire of even Meursault, Mauritius and Mrs Oakley’s sublime chicken pudding. Guiltily, because racing means nothing if it is not a celebration of the best, I notice a fleeting thought going through my mind as I slalom through Swinley Bottom and approach
This year’s Schapiro Spring Foursomes, England’s best tournament by a mile, wasn’t held in the usual Stratford-upon-Avon venue but in the rather grim Warwick Hilton. Adding energy and enthusiasm were four or five junior teams. Don’t imagine they are treated with kid gloves, though. A well-known figure on the circuit was playing against the Under
I spend my life moving. Over recent years it was research. Now it’s caused by that research. But I have become adept at adding things on to each trip. In Naples at the weekend, I visited the Sansevero chapel which contains the ‘veiled Christ’ of Sanmartino — a work Canova said he would have given
The point behind the argument about the Iran nuclear deal goes beyond precise nuclear facts. It is like the row over SALT II when Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter as US President in 1981. SALT (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) was not formally junked, but it did not operate because, after the Soviet invasion of
Alfie Evans was seven months old when he went to hospital with seizures. When more than a year later doctors said that nothing more could be done for him, his parents took the hospital to court. They lost a number of cases on the issue, and when the courts ruled he could not be moved
Home Although the world was led to believe that, thanks to the vote of Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary, the idea of a ‘customs partnership’ with the EU had been killed by six to five in the cabinet Brexit sub-committee, the corpse was revivified by Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, on the Andrew Marr
Since its inception, cryptocurrency has been regarded as technically fascinating but fundamentally unreliable. Those who invested £10 in Bitcoin eight years ago would have £1.6 million today — a fluctuation which, while mind-boggling, further undermines the notion that digitally created currency is a stable store of value. At first, it was dismissed as a toy
Unclued lights are words from a poem, its author and a relevant location. Elsewhere, ignore two accents. Across 7 Music like reggae from Saskatchewan (3) 11 Carriage policeman pulled over beside hedge (6) 13 Judge meets drug addict who’s declining (7) 15 Ionian cardinal crossing Iowa (5) 16 Strong pickle’s sound (5) 17 Seminary
In the early days of the atomic age, Soviet students debated whether it was nobler to become a physicist or a poet. Some of them seem to have been genuinely torn, and one of those may well have been Anatolii Diatlov, who was the deputy chief engineer at Chernobyl during the late-night turbine test that
Ann Maguire was a dedicated teacher, utterly devoted to the children in her care. She had worked in the teaching profession for over four decades, had a loving husband, two grown-up daughters and, after the death of her sister 30 years earlier, selflessly raised her two nephews as her own. She was a good person
It’s difficult to think of a good comparison from the thousands of public holidays, festivals, galas and pageants around the world by which to describe Victory Day celebrations in Russia. Remembrance Day is too sombre, Bastille Day too jolly. The day on which Russians remembers the nasally voice of Joseph Stalin coming over the wireless to announce the end of the war is a curious mix of solemnity and jubilation. In St.
In the White House on Tuesday, with the world just where he wanted it — eyes on the TV, transfixed by his boldness — President Trump uprooted the Iran nuclear deal. Under this agreement, which was signed in July 2015 by Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany,
When a man is tired of Samuel Johnson, he’s tired of life. James Boswell intended his biography of Dr Johnson, published in 1791, to be no mere chronology, but a life packed with the minutiae of ‘volatile details’. Thus he presented a deluge of correspondence, liberal literary extracts and copious Latin quotations; extensive conversations with
Jacob Rees-Mogg and Rab C. Nesbitt excepted, it has become quite difficult to infer much from people’s appearance. In these democratically dressed and coiffed times, we usually have to wait until people start to speak before we get a bead on them. Voice has become the best, and often only, signifier we can rely on.
