Life

High life

Lament for a learned friend

Listing page content here Athens On a sad trip to Athens for my friend Yanni Goulandris’s funeral. Throughout the years, mostly in these pages, I have always referred to him as Professor Yohannes Goulandris, mind you, mostly to annoy him. Yanni did not think much of the Germans, the reason being he was 15 when

More from life

Thinking big

Listing page content here Watching the woman in front of me in the Ascot Tote queue backing five horses in the same race on Saturday reminded me of Lloyd Bentsen, one of the best US politicians never to become president, who died last week. Asked once if it wasn’t rather unfair running simultaneously for vice-president

Spectator Sport

Mad about the boys

In the euphorically barmy delusions of upcoming World Cup invincibility — the English never used to be so insanely carried away when their teams even had a real chance of winning the ruddy thing — I was taken by one nicely observant line on how manager Sven-Goran Eriksson’s qualifying syntax invariably hedges the bets with

Dear Mary

Dear Mary… | 3 June 2006

Q. A colleague and friend and I have been particularly close since she ‘saved my life’ ten years ago, having arranged help for me during a medical emergency. But since my retirement a year and a half ago, my attempts to meet for lunch have been fruitless, the last time particularly upsetting when she slept