Hanky-panky is American slang for doing what comes naturally. In this Valentine’s Day week, I offer you Swoon, a book about great seducers and why women love them — one I knocked off in an afternoon. Written by Betsy Prioleau, it is her second to deal with hanky-panky. (Her first, Seductress, examined history’s most powerful
It’s my birthday. Four in the morning and I’m in the back of a cab coming back from a night out in town with Trev. He’s in the front, telling the driver about this 18-year-old he’s been seeing. You’d think an 18-year-old would be a sort of Holy Grail to a 51-year-old, but no. Far
My ability to almost play the opening bars of Chopin’s Revolutionary Study may seem like a futile skill to have. But I never lost faith that it was going to come in useful one day. I can only play the first bit because I was halfway through learning the piece as a teenager when my
One ‘bridge too far’ should have been enough, but it looks to me as if Michael Gove has already embarked on a second one with his new plan to tackle obesity in schools. Despite having been forced to drop his cherished proposal for an ‘English baccalaureate’, the Education Secretary is reported to be preparing to
In his days as Foreign Secretary Robin Cook once told me that every politician should have a spell as a racing tipster to teach him humility — he tried it for the Glasgow Herald. I am not sure it worked the full miracle in his case, but racing is a true leveller with triumph and
One of the downsides of getting older is witnessing your friends and acquaintances being honoured in various ways. I don’t just mean knighthoods and peerages, I also mind the little things — an entry in Who’s Who, for instance, or an honorary degree from a red-brick university. It’s reached such a point that I daresay
Q. My husband, aged 56, mutters constantly that he is not well. He has a variety of symptoms and I suspect hypochondria, yet he will not put his mind (or mine) at rest by making an appointment with a doctor. How can I make this happen? — A.O.T., London SW11 A. The way to make
At a club table, a group of us were discussing horse–eating, marvelling at the confusion and sentimentality of our fellow countrymen while telling hippophagic anecdotes. I mentioned a typically Provençal street market in Apt. There had been a group of horses. They were not looking happy. More intelligent than Boxer on his way to the
At the age of 55, Gervase Markham set off to walk from London to Berwick without using any bridge or boat, and without swimming, but relying only on a staff to help him leap. That was in 1622. When he returned, with a certificate from the mayor of Berwick, many of his friends — 39
I saw Christine Lagarde outside The Wellcome Trust with a trolley case. She was wearing my scarf — the scarf I had when I was thirty two: a scarf with white dots on royal blue, or should I say French navy? — the very essence of what a scarf should be, which, in red, would
I don’t want to defend Chris Huhne, I really don’t. Apart from anything else, I have always thought the country would be better off if all Oxford PPE graduates were simply imprisoned immediately, instead of the present inefficient system where we wait for them to commit a crime first. This would save us from being
