I’m in Venice for the film festival that just ended and, as an American humorist once wired his paper: ‘Streets full of water, stop. Send funds, stop.’ What is there to say about Venice that hasn’t already been said or written by better men or women — Thomas Mann and Jan Morris to mention just
The army patrols at Nice airport go around three abreast, steely-eyed, fingers on the trigger. They walk slowly and scrutinise the passengers carefully, assessing each individual for minute clues to their psychology. They take the incredibly boring job incredibly seriously, or appear to do so, which must be great comfort to those with honourable intentions
Stefano and his boys got to work with gusto and within a few days the upstairs of my house started looking like the upstairs of a house. ‘I’ve got walls!’ I exclaimed, after one day. The next day: ‘I’ve got doors!’ The day after that I had a wardrobe. ‘Oh, you are wonderful!’ I told
Racing moves off the back pages only when its opponents have bad news to gloat over. Two examples lately have been the disciplining of Irish jump jockey Davy Russell for striking a wayward horse, and the death of the Flat-racer Permian, trained in Yorkshire by Mark Johnston, after he broke a leg as he crossed
Last month, two law professors named Amy Wax and Larry Alexander published a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer praising ‘bourgeois’ values. They argued that many of the social problems afflicting the American working class, such as the opioid epidemic, are partly due to the decline of these values and that reviving them might go some
Our partners Yapp Bros have just scooped the coveted Wine List of the Year gong at the recent Inter-national Wine Challenge, along with Languedoc Merchant of the Year and Loire Merchant of the Year. In their commendation, the judges said: ‘The Yapp Bros list is concise, beautifully illustrated with great writing and offers much more
Poor old Roy Hodgson, why did he take on Crystal Palace? He was having lunch at a Côte in a salubrious suburb of south-west London the other day, indistinguishable in his blazer and slacks from all the other old boys there enjoying a leisurely retirement and looking forward to a postprandial nap. Roy is a
Q. My partner and I recently had two close friends — one a Peer, the other a former Member of the Scottish Parliament — over for lunch. During the course of an otherwise splendid meal, our friend from the House of Lords took a ten-minute call from a former prime minister, remaining at the table for
Foxlow is near Golden Square in west Soho, where drunken hacks used to take long drunken lunches before having stupid drunken ideas. My favourite stupid drunken idea was from a Guardian hack and it involved renting an ice-cream van and asking Nick Cohen and A.A. Gill to drive around in it, selling ice creams, bickering and
Piles of black plastic rubbish sacks lie in the streets of Birmingham because, since the end of June, the dustmen have been on strike. That is not quite what the BBC tells us. On its website the corporation says that ‘refuse workers have resumed strike action’. I complained here a year ago that dustcarts were
