An elegy on the end of elegance

During these dark, endless periods of lockdown, let’s take a trip down memory lane to a time when we still had real high life: parties galore, carefree girls in their summer dresses, and drunken dawns playing polo in dinner jackets. Life forms began to move properly about 500 million years ago, but I will take you back only 50 or so years, when chic creatures moved to the beat of the samba, the tango, the waltz and the cha-cha-cha. The Roaring Twenties roared because of the Great War’s privations, and the fabled, fabulous Fifties were a reaction to the second world war. People ached to have a good time — to splurge, to let go. Hunger and post-war austerity had turned even Paris into a gloomy, cold place.

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Brendan O’Neill

What’s the real reason some on the right hate Volodymyr Zelensky?

By the mid to late 1950s, things had changed, and I hit the ground running.