Life

High life

The death of style

New York Just as I finished complaining last week about the inability of Americans to string together a complete sentence, I realised that they make up for it by being the worst dressed people this side of Ukraine. J. Crew has been in the news lately because the company has changed hands, with hacks waxing

Low life

My world has shrunk to my bed

I was discharged from hospital into local taxi driver Gilles’s brand-new metallic blue Skoda, of which he is intensely proud. I’d been in for more than a week. My pain level had been assessed and the daily morphine dose adjusted, and a new and different species of analgesic prescribed; also lignocaine patches, to be stuck

Real life

How to outsmart a mouse

‘Mr Mouse’s days of fine dining are over,’ said the builder boyfriend as he put the finishing touches to his rodent anti-climbing device in the larder. This was a slice of cardboard, gaffer-taped sideways to the shelf to prevent the mouse who has been lodging with us from accessing it after climbing up the metal

Wild life

How Moscow can pervert the course of Africa’s future

On the lengthy train ride to Kyiv I read my Plokhy as we trundled through seas of mud, passing villages with blue timber churches topped by golden domes gleaming in the spring dawn. A metastasis of Putin’s atrocities against Ukraine has been the entrenching of Russian influence, powered by guns and agitprop, across my home

More from life

Chess pie: how to make the flakiest pastry

Chess pie was, in one sense, new to me when I started learning about it a few months ago. I’d never heard of this favourite of the American South until I came across it in a pie-centric cookery book. But in another sense, it’s extremely familiar – both to me and to anyone who’s ever

No sacred cows

How to mobilise the police

I wasn’t surprised to hear that six police officers raided a pub in Essex after a customer complained about the presence of 15 golliwogs on display behind the bar. After placing the dolls in evidence bags, the officers told the pub’s owner that they were investigating a possible ‘hate crime’. Needless to say, you’re lucky

Spectator Sport

Football’s growing shame

It would take a brave man to pick a fight with Roy Keane, and nobody could quarrel with his view of Liverpool’s Scotland fullback Andy Robertson after a skirmish at Anfield. Robertson appeared to be feebly elbowed in the face as he approached linesman Constantine Hatzidakis at half time. The Scotland captain reacted in the

Dear Mary

Food

Serious about its whimsy: Sessions Arts Club reviewed

The Sessions Arts Club is a restaurant inside the Old Session House in Clerkenwell, a pale George III building where the criminals of Middlesex were once judged in splendour. It’s common for fine once-public buildings to become private buildings now: the old War Office on Whitehall will be, come summer, Raffles at the OWO. The

Mind your language

Poems

The Etymology Wars

Awful you were christened on the eighth daywith a name that was like any name the christener’s gift.   Awful you were christened because your actswere so awfully and obsessively oddand broke every law of the house.Who would have known you served another lawthat advised your awe-filled dreadof what on earth would happen if you didn’t flickthe