The preservation of a strict social hierarchy rests very often on the enforcement of correct modes of address. In America today any university student may address any other as ‘dude’, but those who have attained a certain level of prestige will object if an unwary low-status blunderer ventures to call them ‘bro’. Rebels seeking to
We don’t all get to achieve what we could have achieved in life. And yes, I know, so what? Tough luck. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. But, like it or not, some people really do have the odds stacked more heavily against them than others and yet somehow
Ah, the scents of one’s youth! What hot, sour teenage kisses and grinding youth club discos would be conjured up for me by one whiff of Aqua Manda or the original Charlie. Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, one for each chapter of her life, but true perfume addicts may find
Since reading Helen Gordon’s The Meteorites, I keep catching myself in imaginary conversation with an Essex thatcher called Frederick Pratt. On 9 March 1923, he was working in a wheat field at Ashdon Hall Farm, near Saffron Walden, when he heard a strange ‘sissing’ sound and looked up to see ‘the earth fly up like
Sharks were never far from our minds as we grew up on the beach in Adelaide. Although attacks were rare, they were real. My grandfather was witness to the fatal mauling of a swimming instructor in the 1930s, and later a friend from university was killed while scuba diving off Port Noarlunga. Yet for the
Shortly before Bill Gates’s seventh birthday in 1962, his parents stuffed their son into a button-down shirt and blazer for a visit to Century 21, a bold showcase of scientific prowess in their home town of Seattle. This futuristic fair was intended as the nation’s rebuff to Soviet Russia following the Sputnik satellite launch, which
Since it became independent in 1929, Vatican City has been the world’s smallest state. Every evening the gates close, leaving behind only 500 permanent residents. I once spent a week behind the walls as a guest in the Santa Marta hostel where the Pope lives; at night the deserted courtyards are thrillingly spooky. But it’s
I came to Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars as a schoolboy after watching I, Claudius, the BBC series based on Robert Graves’s pair of novels about imperial Rome. Incredibly, it’s almost half a century since this was compulsory Monday night viewing in our household. The mere sight of the snake slithering across the opening credits
