Gstaad The man in the white suit is not exactly a matinee idol around these parts. The mauvaises langues have it that the rich fear him more than the poor because they have more to lose. I’m not so sure, although it does make sense. This was not the case in the past: Spartan kings
I can see why rock stars and other impetuous celebrity types accidentally top themselves with drug cocktails. When you are spaced out on medicaments it’s easy to forget what you have or haven’t taken. A month ago I was prescribed a dose of corticosteroids to see off a chest infection: 60mg a day for four
‘We don’t take cash,’ said the boy behind the counter in Pret after I tried to hand him a £5 note and two pound coins. ‘My’ ham and cheese baguette and bottle of Coke sat in a brown paper bag on the counter and a woman standing beside me grimaced as she waited to be
I’ve been gripped by the Telegraph’s Lockdown Files. The 100,000 WhatsApp messages on Matt Hancock’s phone, handed to the paper by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, contain an embarrassment of riches. For those who thought the curtailment of our liberties between March 2020 and July 2021 was justified by ‘the science’, these exchanges will be an
Q. Since my wife and I went our separate ways I have had lots of social invitations. My ex always dealt with the thank-you letters and I am useless at getting around to writing them. Now a friend has introduced me to an app called ChatGPT which writes letters and even poems for you if
‘Come dance with me in Ireland.’ That has always struck me as an enchanting prospect, though a recent Hibernian venture did not involve dancing and took place in London. There was an Irish academic called R.B. McDowell. To call him eccentric would be an understatement. He adorned Trinity College Dublin for decades, starting from the
Listeners to Today last week were fascinated by an item about foreign words with no equivalent in English that must be translated by a whole sentence. If brunch is an example of a portmanteau word, these are, I think, examples of holdall words, packed full of meaning. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary people, had asked for examples
Had I south Devon’s embattled cliffs, Ablaze with gorse-bloom and salted light, The sand and the schist and the chalk cliffs Of rust and slate and softest white, I would spread the cliffs under your feet: But I, being here, have only ploughed fields; I have spread ploughed fields under your feet; Head south, love;
Enough to walk – enough to walk, untied enough to move together side- by-side, to let the words occur to let the world occur around. Scrap the table in between, the stare and all it means, enough to brush a shoulder, let a misstep cause two hips to touch. Enough a glance, a glancing off
Even though I fly a lot, I retain the notion that air travel should be treated as a special occasion for which one should dress accordingly. I am writing this from Gatwick, accompanied by one of those canvas bags you get for a fiver at Sainsbury’s Back in the day, if you showed up looking
The London Times of 10 March 1922 drily recorded: ‘It is very seldom that Irish racing and hunting people make a determined attack on an English meeting without paying at least their expenses. One gathers that they did more than that yesterday.’ The Times was chronicling Connemara Black’s triumph in the Foxhunters’ Challenge Cup –
