New York When Greek democracy was restored back in 1974, some ‘democratic’-leaning newspapers tried to criminalise my writings, so much so that I got 16 months in the pokey for ‘anti-Greek’ comments, whatever that meant. I did not serve the sentence, which was eventually thrown out on appeal, but left for London instead, and the
Five of us, standing in a semi-circle on a varnished wooden floor facing the yoga teacher, breathing deeply in concert. In through the nose, hold, out through the mouth. Easter Sunday morning. Christ is risen. We slowly inhale and exhale to the sound of distant church bells and the cheeping of a pair of sparrows
Eighteen months into my car injury battle with The Slobs, I slump over my kitchen table and throw my head into my hands. Through bitter tears, I email the ‘customer experience’ people at Aviva the following cri de coeur: ‘Right, that’s it. It’s official. I can’t take any more. I can no longer fight this
Always on the lookout for new heart-wrenching tales of animal suffering, the press has seized upon the news that a great many British horse-riders are too fat for their mounts. In the quaint words of the Sunday Telegraph, this puts horses ‘at risk of several welfare conditions’, including back pain, lameness and general bad temper.
According to a new survey commissioned by the BBC, Britain is now divided into seven different social classes. The good news, dear reader, is that you’re almost certainly at the top of the pyramid in the class the BBC calls the ‘social elite’. Members of this group own houses worth, on average, £325,000 and their
Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It listed an unusual character in the credits, a swearing consultant. And no wonder, for he must have been one of the busiest people on set. Lively on-screen swearing has been largely absent recently — until mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday, that is. Commentators Andrew Cotter and Dan Topolski were amiably rhubarbing away on the
Q. My mother lives in a fine old house in Jersey and has a lovely garden. Unfortunately her Portuguese gardener has contrived to make the place look as though it belongs to the seafront in Llandudno. He has placed a large plastic owl on top of a bush in the centre of what was once
The Ten Room is the -restaurant inside the new Café Royal Hotel, which occupies the curve of Regent Street from Air Street down to Piccadilly Circus and its bundles of mad tourists, who stare like Doctor Who extras at the nothingness in the sky and the greater nothingness beyond; it is neat advertising, neat capitalism.
Why has behalf so rapidly collapsed into misuse? Everyone says things like ‘On my behalf I don’t want money’, or ‘The car crashed through bad driving on your behalf’. Rather than attributing the action to a vicarious agent, they simply mean ‘for my part’ or ‘on your part’. I should like to see what the
A sample of things people should know about, or have heard of, whether they’re 12 or not: George Washington, George Gershwin, George Eliot, Henry Ford, Charlie Chaplin, Elvis Presley, Jane Austen, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Muhammad Ali, Roger Federer, Queen Victoria, Snow White, Bing Crosby, Saint Paul, Emily Bronte,
