My first copy of The Great Gatsby cost me $2. It was the year 1953, the cover was dark blue with city lights in the background, and a pair of mournful green eyes looking at nothing in particular. I had just finished Tender Is the Night, so I took Gatsby home in exhilaration, not unlike
Before we buried her in the cemetery, we attended a brief service in the church hall opposite. When she was alive, my mother’s cousin had enjoyed the kind of faith that is pretty much indistinguishable from cast-iron certainty. What we were lowering into a hole after the service, she’d have wanted us to think, was
‘I’m sorry. There is no one of that name booked into this hotel,’ said the receptionist. No, wait. That won’t do. She didn’t say that at all. And there is no point to this story unless I tell you what she really said, or rather shouted, which was, ‘I am sorry! Zer is no one
Former champion jockey Bob Davies once walked into the paddock and asked the trainer of the horse he was about to ride over three miles and 24 stiff fences, ‘Does he jump?’ Back came the reply: ‘That’s what you’re here to find out.’ ‘When they say that to you,’ Mick Fitzgerald told me on Sunday,
As someone trying to set up a free school, it’s a criticism I hear over and over again: he just wants to secure a free private education for his children at the taxpayer’s expense. Ed Balls has said it, the general secretary of the NUT has said it, Fiona Millar has said it. And it’s
The late Alan Watkins, in whose memory we enjoyed a commemorative lunch at the Garrick Club the other day, was for a spell the wine correspondent of the Observer. He wrote almost exclusively about French wines. I used to chide him gently, pointing out that there were marvellous wines from the New World. He would
Roger Alton reviews the week in Sport How depressing, and poignant, to hear Danny Cipriani talking at the weekend about his imminent departure to join his new rugby team Down Under, the Melbourne Rebels — one of the country’s most gifted fly-halfs is heading away just when England is really short of quality at No
Q. I have noticed that, when you use the new type of tomato ketchup bottle, it makes a rude noise which can be embarrassing if you are eating alone with other couples behind you. I wondered how I could alert fellow diners to the noise having come from the bottle and not from me? —
