Gstaad I stood outside the hotel lobby watching the snow blanket the parking lot, turning it into an almost pretty sight. I had been playing backgammon inside with a large and rowdy cast of characters, some of whom, like Floki Busson, mother of Arpad, and Leonida Goulandris, are veterans of the great games of the
I thought no one else was going to turn up at the crematorium to wave Terry off. But as the seconds ticked closer to the appointed time, knots of ashen-faced mourners began to trickle in from the car park and congregate around the chapel doors. Then Terry arrived. He arrived in a cardboard box inside
The Wagnerian tenor Lauritz Melchior was supposed to conclude an operatic scene one night by leaping upon a mechanical swan gliding across the stage. Unfortunately the appointed swan arrived, and departed, before he had concluded the key aria. More than a little miffed by the failings of the production team, Melchior turned to the audience
I can well imagine my children saying to me: ‘This is off the record, Dad’ As a member of the chattering classes, I am riveted by the Julie Myerson story. For those of you who haven’t been following it, Myerson has just published a book called The Lost Child in which she intercuts the story
Q. My husband is a retired scientist but still much in demand. Recently he was part of a small committee organising a world congress in Brisbane, judged to have been very successful, thanks in no small part to him. Every time we now meet one of the other committee members, a businessman, he teases my
‘Quantitative easing?’ said my husband with an unpleasant iatrical chortle. ‘Reminds me of that bit in Humphrey Clinker.’ Tobias Smollett had trained as a surgeon, and he set up practice in Downing Street, surprising as it might sound, where his initial physical interventions proved no more financially rewarding than Gordon Brown’s decade of fiddling with
When Professor Susan Greenfield warned last month of the damaging effects of new technologies on childhood, my first instinct was to dismiss it as another hand-wringing exercise. On one point, though, where she complains of the dangers of instant gratification, she might be right. I’m not even sure the problem is confined to children. One
