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A trip to Berlin with John Smith before the wall came down

Last Sunday night 8,000 illuminated balloons, tethered along eight miles of Berlin’s former inner-city border between East and West Germany, were released into the sky to commemorate the dismantling of the Berlin Wall 25 years ago. The wall, built to stem a growing flood of East Berliners to the western part of the city, had

The man feminists seemed to think was worse than the Taleban

Feature writers aren’t often acclaimed for their courage, but Neil Lyndon deserves a bronze plaque in St Bride’s. Twenty-two years ago, he wrote a book called No More Sex War in which he questioned some of the assumptions underlying the modern feminist movement. He pointed out that many of the advances made by women over

Spectator Sport

Dear Mary

Food

A buffet in an Egyptian tomb

Atlantico is a vast buffet inside the Lopesan Costa Meloneras Resort Spa and Casino in Gran Canaria. The Lopesan Costa Melonoras Resort Spa and Casino — or, as I will henceforth call it, TLCMRSAC — looks like Citizen Kane’s Xanadu without the art, the metaphor or the tragedy. It has towers, chandeliers, vistas, pools, terraces,

Mind your language

Why must every ‘accident’ be an ‘incident’?

I had thought that the saying ‘Accidents will happen in the best regulated families’ was a vulgar reference to children born unexpectedly. The Oxford English Dictionary records accident being used in just that way in the middle of the 19th century. On its own, ‘accidents will happen’ dates from at least as far back as