Dear Mary… Q. Last week I had dinner in a restaurant with some old friends whose number included a woman we all like a lot with her new (younger) boyfriend. The latter responded to every question about himself and his work as though he was his own public-relations officer. Everything was going very well, everyone
I have just been staying outside Rome near a town called Ladispoli. In ancient times, the area, which was a luxury seaside resort for various Roman emperors, was called Alsium. During the second Punic war it managed to exempt itself from having to send troops to fight Hannibal. Later, both Tiberius and Marcus Aurelius had
‘I could have told you that,’ said my husband, as if this were the general state of reality. Normally if I ask him any question about his native tongue, he says, ‘Don’t ask me, you’re the expert.’ The thing he could have told me was the meaning of ‘son of Attenborough’, about which I had
