Exactly 50 years ago last Friday night going into Saturday morning — 1 July into the 2nd — in Ketchum, Idaho, Ernest Hemingway asked his wife Mary to sing an Italian song, ‘Tutti mi chiamano bionda’, everyone calls me blondie. After they had both gone up to bed he silently padded down the stairs, stepping
I listened to actor, presenter, and ‘activist’ Tony Robinson choose his Desert Island Discs on Sunday. He’s a doctrinaire leftist, and all my prejudices are on the opposite side, so I didn’t expect I would be cheering the man on. Nor did I. I’m an ardent listener to Desert Island Discs and I don’t think
One day in the early Nineties, a trainee recruitment consultant looked down at their carpet and thought, ‘I wonder what’s under there.’ And so began a mania for exposed floorboards that has had the British professional aspirant class in a vice grip ever since. My twenty-something upstairs neighbours are currently in this grip. Nothing will
Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety Forgive me if I don’t join in the orgy of sanctimony surrounding the News of the World. If any evidence is uncovered that proves a member of the paper’s staff hacked into Milly Dowler’s phone and deleted her voicemail messages, then, yes, he or she should be prosecuted to
Lambourn trainer Sylvester Kirk retains the distinctive tones of his native Donegal/Tyrone. There was just one moment during his eight years as assistant to Richard Hannon, a period which coincided with the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when he wondered if the accent was going to leave him alive. Deputed to drive the Hannons to Windsor
Well, did you pick out 21-year-old Petra Kvitova for the women’s title at Wimbledon? Me neither, though it shouldn’t have been that hard. Well, did you pick out 21-year-old Petra Kvitova for the women’s title at Wimbledon? Me neither, though it shouldn’t have been that hard. She’s the world number seven, was a quarter-finalist at
Q. Is plate-swapping in restaurants now acceptable behaviour? When dining out, a not-so-young Dutch couple I know, both smart and rich, are in the habit of blithely exchanging plates midway through each course so that they may taste one another’s choice of food. However, in one fashionable restaurant recently, a handwritten note accompanied their bill
Rules is the restaurant where Edward VII ate himself to death and, in a way, it looks like him. It is spacious and regal and covered in velvet. His personal dining room upstairs is a cocktail bar now, with a lump of Stilton as focal point and memorial. Downstairs there are stags’ heads and a
Last week’s industrial action did not quite convey the certainty with which in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies) opened the preamble to their constitution: ‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’ That was an era when anarcho-syndicalists excitedly spoke of industrial unionism. ‘Capable and courageous industrial
