New York A busy ten days, or nights rather, with some heroic drinking thrown in for good measure. Hangovers discriminate against the old nowadays, but no one is doing anything about it — not in Washington, not in New York, not in London. Our former chairman Algy Cluff’s dinner party at a gentleman’s club,
‘Can I get a taxi around here?’ The man standing behind the counter of the convenience store looked at the floor and slowly shook his head. ‘What about buses?’ I said. ‘Taxis? Buses? You’re joking, aren’t you?’ said a chap standing behind me. He was wearing bedroom slippers and clutching a tin of processed carrots.
Kenya At his house on Kenya’s coast our neighbour Paul Spicer kept a photograph of himself as quite a young man stepping out with his boss Tiny Rowland, our founding President Jomo Kenyatta and 1970s MI6 chief Sir John Ogilvy Rennie (known as ‘C’). In the image they are all sharply dressed — by
Our second offer from Naked Wines, the iconoclastic online merchant that funds selected winemakers via so-called angels — wine lovers who pay a sub for distribution to said vignerons in return for fine vino. Since there’s no marketing, advertising, agents, wholesalers etc, RRPs are said to be as low as possible. I’m not entirely convinced
I’ve been contacted by a professor at a leading Russell Group university who is worried about the spread of progressive dogma in the UK’s higher education sector. He highlighted last week’s report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission which claimed that around a quarter of students from ethnic minority backgrounds at Britain’s universities have
New Zealanders can teach the world a lot about sportsmanship. Steve Hansen after last Saturday’s All Blacks defeat by England in the World Cup semi-final showed the uncomplaining loser can be just as impressive as the triumphant winner. As he put it: ‘Winning’s easy…[but] when you lose… you have to show humility, do it gracefully
Q. My brilliant brother, who graduated last year, could find nowhere to live in London so we were all delighted when he found work as a live-in assistant to an interesting (and successful) employer who works from home. My brother is super-efficient and lovely to have around and I’ve no doubt that he’s made himself
Bob Bob Cité is a restaurant dangling like testicles from the underside of the Leadenhall Building in the City of London. It is shaped like a series of yellow train carriages, for a voyage no one will ever make; the building above it manages, in the way of the age, to be both absurd and
‘Hospitals named after sandwiches kill five,’ ran a headline in the Times in June. When it was tweeted by the journalist Adam Macqueen, people pointed out that there really is a Mayo Clinic (in Minnesota), though egg or tuna is not specified, and there had been a BLT group of hospitals (Barts and the London
