Provence Molly MacCarthy launched the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in the spring of 1920 with two aims. The first was to bring together the old Bloomsbury set who’d been dissipated by the first world war and the second was to encourage her dilatory husband, Desmond, to write his memoir. She was successful in the first but
After running all the errands I could to help my parents, a letter from West Midlands Police arrived. They were throwing the book at us because I’d been caught doing 40mph in a 30 in my parents’ car. The photo evidence showed their little silver Peugeot being driven by me on a dual carriageway in
Oh dear, it all got a bit out of hand. The wines for this all-Tuscan offer from Mr Wheeler looked so deliciously appealing that rather than taste and write them up on my own, I thought it would be a brilliant wheeze to sample them with guests over Sunday lunch. ‘You twit,’ said Mrs Ray.
In an otherwise excellent article for the Sunday Telegraph last week about our government’s hopeless pandemic response, Dan Hannan made one comment I’d like to take issue with. He wrote: ‘For years to come, Britain will be poor, indebted and repressive because, in early March 2020, no one (with the exception of one brave Sunday
With the world on fire – not to mention large swathes of the North Sea – it is understandable that some of the scurvier implications of Angela Rayner’s stonking planning bill, aimed at streamlining all development, from roads and power stations to housing, might have gone unnoticed. Which is a pity, because it’s not very
Q. Annoyingly, one of the Sunday newspapers ran an article about the ‘least used but most scenic footpaths’ in the UK, which identified paths in our immediate area. We have never had a problem with local trespassers on our own land but this article has prompted a deluge of incomer ramblers. They are traipsing not
The immaculate bourgeois socialists of north London – that is not code for Jews – like to eat and drink in the former servants’ quarters of Kenwood House, because this is a mad country. Kenwood is beautiful. It is Hampstead’s best house, standing at the top of the heath, near the head waters of the
‘What are your intentions towards my daughter?’ said my husband, screwing an imaginary monocle into his eye. We had been trying to work out what intentional living meant, with regard to the Duchess of Sussex’s new brand of flower sprinkles and raspberry jam. ‘The collection is infused with joy, love, and a touch of whimsy,’
I like to think I’m special to you, although I know you have so many special friends here, in the dark heart of the year when even the neighbour’s rowan scrapes against the window, plaintive, with that sound everyone hated as a child. What days I have seem shorter than ever and all my jackets
zaglossus attenboroughi ‘a single echidna specimen collected in 1961… near the top of Mount Rara, in the Cyclops Mountains of Northern Dutch New Guinea [now Indonesia] was named in recognition of Attenborough’s contribution to increased public appreciation of New Guinean flora and fauna through his documentary work…’ – Wikipedia A world from there but roughly
Among late summer’s casualties, their dry retreats, their whispering in falls and drifting piles of leaves, her going went the worst for him with foxgloves where wire fencing sags, a sozzled hollyhock’s nosedive, the foxes’ feast of ripped bin bags anemones somehow survive; entangled heaps of splintered canes, their broken-backed tomato plants and, rattled by
I never enter a Cheltenham Festival week without thinking of the Irish punter who won enough on champion hurdler Istabraq to pay off the mortgage on his house. He then lost the lot when Ireland’s hope Danoli failed to win the Gold Cup. ‘To be sure,’ he declared, ‘it was only a small house anyway.’
