New York Election nights in the Bagel were always spent at 73 East 73rd Street, in Bill and Pat Buckley’s house, more often than not described as palatial by eager-to-please gossip columnists. In reality it was a fine New York maisonette, better suited for entertainment rather than cosy living, the latter reserved for their tiny
Last Thursday I was volunteer driver for the day for a Heartbeaters’ outing. Heartbeaters is a local exercise and social club for people recovering from heart attacks that meets weekly (and perhaps weakly) in the Baptist church hall for an hour of gentle physical jerks. We went to Greenway, Agatha Christie’s house on the east
It was a rainy morning on Friday when I woke up warm as toast in a small castle in Northumberland, surrounded on all sides as far as the eye could see by the immaculate, formal gardens still dancing under the weight of the winter sky and beyond them racing-green moorland stretching to infinity and eternity
‘Look here, Sunshine,’ I remember Eric Morecambe responding to a raised eyebrow from André Previn about the comedian’s musical efforts. ‘I am playing the right notes, just maybe not in the right order.’ My tipping goes like that too. For the previous Flat season I suggested that William Haggas’s Conquest might ‘pop up at a
‘Wow, that’s brave,’ said John Kampfner, the former editor of the New Statesman. ‘I’d never do that.’ I had just told him I’d agreed to be on Have I Got News for You and, as soon as he said this, I began to have second thoughts. ‘Oh Christ. D’you think I’ve made a terrible mistake?’
Q. I am 44 and, for various reasons, have been single for about five years, but I now have a girlfriend. When people ring to invite me to dinner, I would like to say, ‘I have a girlfriend now. Can I bring her?’, but I do not want to embarrass anyone since I am well
My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. I’d been reading
The most powerful storyline of the US election, which the fawning media did nothing to challenge, was the idea that Barack Obama was an underdog who had miraculously triumphed against a hostile establishment to make a presidential bid. In this he was rather helped by the simplistic American belief that race somehow trumps all other
