Some jerk know-nothing writes in an unreadable American newspaper that Greece is back — Athens, actually. He would, he’s an American who probably thinks that the lack of starving beggars in the streets à la Calcutta in the 1920s means we’re back. Have another hamburger, asshole, and stick to Trump-bashing. I knew Athens before it
I’d missed the train, and the next was due in 45 minutes, so I popped into the nearby salon for a haircut, two months since the last one. Half Price Monday for Students, it said on a board outside. Inside, three women attended to three female heads in a spacious salon with the doors and
Leaving Norton, the antivirus software package, is a bit like trying to leave the EU. You may think, once you have decided to click the ‘X’ button in the box that says you don’t want to subscribe to this expensive protection outfit any more, that you have left. You may think that it was your
C.S. Forester, creator of Hornblower, a great student of Anglo-French relations, wrote a now often overlooked exhortative novel titled Death to the French. Contemporary readers might consider it triggering if not racist, yet it captures well a traditional British reaction when angry Frenchmen start throwing missiles at us. Here in the south of France we
Last week, it emerged that Linda Bellos, veteran feminist of the Old Left, faces legal action for having said the wrong thing about transgender people who hit women. This week’s transgender thought-criminal is Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party. Someone who might well be considered impeccably on-message on gender issues is accused of being
Under David Remnick’s editorship, the New Yorker has become stronger than ever during a period where many titles have collapsed. So you’d think he might be able to fend off the kind of nonsense he’s just experienced. The New Yorker has branched out to publish unmissable podcasts, regular emails, blogs and events which combine to
We were going to run an entirely French offer this week courtesy of FromVineyardsDirect, but I couldn’t resist the 2017 Esterházy Estoras Grüner Veltliner (1) from Austria. I used to drink buckets of GV with my late godmother, the novelist and sometime contributor to this magazine, Sarah Gainham. I’ve never lost my taste for it.
According to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, America’s universities have succumbed to ‘safetyism’, whereby students are protected from anything that might cause them anxiety or discomfort. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind, published this week, they attribute the spread of ‘trigger warnings’, ‘safe spaces’ and ‘bias hotlines’ on campus to a misplaced
I first became aware of Alastair Cook in the Ashes summer of 2005 when he was named the Young Cricketer of the Year by the cricket writers’ association following some epic performances in the county game, not least taking a double hundred off the touring Australians. The assembled brains on our table, including Mike Brearley,
Q. I am in my mid-sixties and have started to suffer from nominal aphasia. At a recent wedding in the Highlands, two very familiar faces came towards me and I couldn’t put a name to either. Worse, at a wake following a funeral, one old friend was very upset when I failed to recognise her,
Sketch is a restaurant and art gallery in Conduit Street, Mayfair. There is a photograph of the Queen in the lobby. It is a wonderful photograph of her because she is covered in white fur and her eyes are closed, as if she just can’t bear to look at us any more. She looks like
If you’d like to buy a copy of Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, published in 1704, there’s one on AbeBooks for £131,245.03, plus £12 P&P. Do people just click on such items, I wonder, and wait for the book to plop through the letterbox a few
