To London for a brief visit to meet Spectator readers, as nice a reason as I can think of for getting on an airplane, except for an assignation with Rebecca Hall, my latest obsession among the fairer sex. Our digs in Old Queen Street remind me a bit of my schooldays, not that The Spectator’s
One evening last week, I trotted over to the caravan site’s clubhouse to use the wifi and pick up emails. One email was from a friend who reported that someone had described me, after meeting me for the first time, as an ‘intellectual’. Unsure whether to be flattered or appalled by this misjudgment, I ordered
‘Congratulations! You’ve qualified for The Sunshine Tour!’ beamed the lady judge, as she pinned a rosette to my horse’s bridle. I don’t know what The Sunshine Tour is, but it sounds like it has nothing to do with equestrian pursuits and everything to do with putting old people on a bus and taking them on
It is exactly 40 years since my elder brother John gave up a successful career as a publisher to set up in business on his own as an antiquarian bookseller. He lived at the time in a fine 18th-century house on Kew Green next to the botanical gardens, and perhaps for no reason other than
Cape Peron was my easiest choice for our Twelve to Follow. When Henry Candy smiles his gentle smile, as he did after Cape Peron won the Park Hill Hospital Handicap at Newbury in early May, and tells you ‘this one could be pretty good’, you take notice. Cape Peron has run twice since and hasn’t
I was at a surprise birthday party for a member of the cabinet last week when a Conservative minister spotted me walking past and grabbed my arm. ‘You must do it,’ he said. ‘Do what?’ ‘Become the Conservative candidate in Hammersmith. If all you manage to do is defeat Andy Slaughter and then spend the
Q. What to do when you are an unwilling eavesdropper in a train carriage in which people you know assume they are alone and start talking very indiscreetly about someone else you know and you have left it too late to alert them to your presence? — Name and address withheld A. Ideally you will
Marcher country, the Jura lies to the east of Burgundy and the contrast is marked. Burgundy: the very name is redolent of opulence. The architecture, the courtliness, the great wines: the aristocratic civilisation of Burgundy is a dance to the cornucopia of nature. Among the rocks and hills and gorges of the Jura, nature is
Oxford Dictionaries have been adding some rather silly words to their online resources, such as phablet (‘a smartphone with a large screen’, a portmanteau word, from phone and tablet) or jorts (‘jean shorts’, another portmanteau word). I can’t see much future in them, nor could I in squee, until I had a conversation with Veronica.
I have preferred the practice wall and not the netted court a decent racquet and a ball the steady thump of steady thought and no one else at all
I am surprised no more attention has been given to Martin Vander Weyer’s suggestion in The Spectator two weeks ago that a mansion tax should be levied on those buyers who pay no other UK tax. Why has it taken so long for anyone to raise this idea? Where tax paid against income should be
