New York God, it’s great to be Greek right now. We’ve out-front-paged the Holocaust as well as the Israeli ‘existential threat’. (The latter has been jerked up a notch, and Big Bagel papers present the Iran problem as 1939 and the Nazis having the bomb.) When the Greek alarm first sounded in mid-2009 in a
The book launch party was terrific. To those who put it on, and to everyone who came, I am a beggar even in thanks. A salute, too, to the 200-plus of you who entered the joke competition and to the 15 winners, every one of whom was the life and soul. A special mention in
What I know about mountaineering you could write on the front of a postage stamp. But I’m willing to bet Sir Edmund Hillary did not have bright pink, ergonomic insoles in his boots called ‘Superfeet’. I have. I was sold them along with vast amounts of other gear I’m fairly sure must be extraneous by
I knew I shouldn’t have gone to the Economist’s end-of-summer party last month. Within seconds of arriving, I was buttonholed by Venetia Butterfield, publishing director of Viking. Two years ago I signed a contract with Viking to write a book about class and education, but I got sidetracked by the West London Free School. The
Here is one for the experts at pub-quiz racing nights: which well-known jumps trainer has scored twice at Royal Ascot without yet registering training a winner at the Cheltenham Festival? Answer: Paul Webber. His glorious Cropredy Lawn yard near Banbury turns out a stream of decent hurdlers and chasers most winters — think of Flying
Parental advisory: what follows contains asterisks that some may find upsetting. It is clear that Steve Williams, Tiger Woods’s former caddy, and John Terry, the hopefully soon-to-be-former captain of England, are not particularly nice men. In fact they are assholes, to use one of Williams’s favourite words. So when Williams was asked what he would
Q. In the event of the expected death of a dear friend, I have been asked to organise the funeral. I have no idea which newspaper I should put the announcement in. Each death notice costs about £60, so if I were to do the Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent, it would all mount up,
Wolfgang Puck, who is a globally famous chef, has opened Cut on Park Lane. Beef is Cut’s thing and who doesn’t like beef? Except I am convinced that if cows, like women, discovered their own strength, there would be a cow coup, like in Planet of the Apes. (This is a very personal fantasy.) How
Of course I live in the past — where better? But I found out this week exactly how many years in the past. The answer is six, which seems to me indecently like futurism. The occasion for my discovery was hearing in a politics programme that there were a harmful number of spads in government.
