New York What follows has been covered ad nauseam, but I wonder why people were surprised at the planned breakaway football Super League? Professional sport in Europe now follows the American way, which means that money comes before tradition, hometown loyalty and the fans — the shmucks who live and die for their teams. The
‘Willie or bum?’ I said to Catriona on the motorway. Everything in my recent medical career has been introduced via the former: cameras, cutters, stents. I naturally assumed it would be the same choice of pathways for exploring and snipping off three pieces of my liver. At the wheel, Catriona laughed at my idiocy and
Being told by the Tories not to put a local election poster in my window because it will only remind people why they don’t like them has reminded me why I don’t like them. It also put my blood pressure up, according to my newly delivered blood pressure monitor. I strapped the thing to my
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of the 20th century, had pinned above his desk. During my five-year stint as The Spectator’s theatre critic I did my best to follow that philosophy. But according to a new set of guidelines devised by
Anything been happening in football in the past couple of weeks? No? Moving on then… Hang about though. The doomed relegation-free European Super League may have had a shorter life than the average mayfly but it generated the level of fury produced by poking a stick in a hornets’ nest. How justified was all the
Q. Since the relaxation of lockdown, my brother and his wife have started coming to our garden for takeaway meals. My sister-in-law always says she isn’t going to eat at all, so we mustn’t order anything for her. But when the food arrives, she gets a fork and enthusiastically begins picking off everyone else’s plate.
The St Pancras Brasserie and Champagne Bar by Searcys is as expansive as its name, but ghostly. It is an immense Art Deco restaurant spilling on to an empty platform at the station. When restaurants opened their patios and gardens, I fretted that they would be too busy to be enjoyed: a diner would cling
‘Sleaze, sleaze, sleaze!’ exclaimed Sir Keir Starmer in Prime Minister’s Questions last week, hoping that a triple serving might stick. He meant to suggest financial corruption, though his language came from the hospitable semantic field that also corrals sexual meanings. The sexually dirty also overlaps constantly with the literally dirty. In 2013 Ukip’s Godfrey Bloom
Goddard prints his footsteps in the gloom and, from the transepts, Breathes an air swaying with a pleasant doom, not quite his own. He marks the candles, too, stacked and swelling for another age, And, for the thousandth time, repeats their sigh, repeats their sigh. Still the organ keys lie waiting for him, like the
through the French windows we see Vanessabarefoot on the misty suburban lawndoing an arabesque on the wet grassas we troop down to the breakfast tableher stepfather behind his black moustachesatisfied to have woken us at dawnwith a shout come on, get up! Vanessaat fifteen or sixteen prepares herselfto quietly drop the bomb of pregnancybetween the
Want to know the winner of the Grand National in 2023? You heard it here first: when the ante-post books open, get in early on Kitty’s Light, trained by Christian Williams and to be ridden, I hope, by Jack Tudor. Being married to a racing scribe is a bit like being an angler’s wife: you
