There’s nothing to add to Martin Vander Weyer’s item about Hellas of two weeks ago in these here pages except a Yogi Berra pearl, ‘It ain’t over till it’s over.’ The Greek drama will go on and on until the brinkmanship is exhausted. The EU has blinked, as I thought it would. Although Greek accounting
On Sunday morning, I was kicking a football in the back garden with my grandson. I had bought him his first pair of football boots, Optimum Tribals, junior size 11, blue and orange, each boot furnished with six very adult-looking steel studs: four on the sole, two at the back of the heel. We were
The doctor eyed me suspiciously as I walked into her consulting room. ‘Ye-es?’ she said, nervously, eyeing me up and down, after I knocked softly and entered apologetically, as I always do. Whenever I go to see her, my GP gives the impression of being taken totally by surprise, and put to astonishing inconvenience, by
Nothing has been lost since William Powell Frith painted his Derby Day panorama in 1858: today, instead of the carriages and corseted courtesans, the acrobats and pickpockets, he could cram his canvas with scarlet-lipped ladies in shades posing for selfies; with men in impeccable morning dress coping no better with greasy hamburgers than Ed Miliband
It’s June, and the country-house summer opera festivals are now in full swing. Glyndebourne, which opened the season last month, has now been joined by its leading emulators — Garsington in Oxfordshire, The Grange in Hampshire and Longborough in Gloucestershire; and next month a newcomer, Winslow Hall Opera in Buckinghamshire, will be putting on La
I’ve been reading Fire and Ashes, Michael Ignatieff’s account of his disastrous foray into politics, in an attempt to understand where it all went wrong for Ed Miliband. In combination with the election postmortems and interviews with the people in Miliband’s inner circle, it’s extremely illuminating. For those unfamiliar with his story, Ignatieff is a
A rather desultory Test series is taking place in the Caribbean where Australia are marmalising the West Indies, with a one-time Bournemouth club cricketer called Adam Voges scoring his maiden Test century at the near-pensionable age of 35 (the oldest ever as it happens: bodes well for the Ashes, doesn’t it?). During lunch the other
Q. My parents brought me up to write only my name in a visitors’ book. However, following a recent long weekend in the house of a friend’s father, I was last to sign and found the other guests had all written lengthy gushing tributes to our host. If I didn’t follow suit, my own entry
The Beaumont Hotel is a bright white cake in the silent part of Mayfair, where the only sound is Patek Philippe watches, tick-tocking. We are in the eye of the storm, where it should be quiet; of the cacophony of Selfridges, just to the north, we hear nothing. It is the first hotel from Chris
A notion is going about that, just as readers of film reviews receive spoiler alerts, so readers of anything should get a trigger warning. Otherwise something nasty in the woodshed might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder or worse. ‘I use the phrase trigger warning myself,’ wrote Kate Maltby in a Spectator blog the other day, ‘to
How many times these days I say those words, Muttering them quietly under my breath Or petulantly as the telephone rings Or shocked at some reported piece of news Or simply as a constant formula For things that pass by daily, and are gone Into the nowhere that life seems to be Day after day,
