New York When A Moveable Feast was published in 1964 I had been living in Paris for six years. I was 27 and in love with Papa Hemingway’s favourite city, one that he described as ‘a mistress who always has new lovers’. One didn’t speak this way back then, but the book really blew my
Prince Philip is right about modern television sets. He says they are poorly designed. If one needs to adjust one’s set, he told a television interviewer, one has to get down on all fours with magnifying glass, instruction manual, and a torch between one’s teeth, and virtually make love to the thing. He also has
It’s quite unusual to eat similar things together. If we’re having carrots, for example, it’s normal to eat only one type of carrot, but anyone who was to taste three completely different carrots one after the other — say a biodynamic baby carrot, a medium-sized organic purple one and a fat luminous orange one —
For the past three months I have been reviewing films for the Times and it has been quite an eye-opener. Before embarking on the job, I subscribed to the general view that cinema is not what it used to be. With the exception of a brief renaissance in the early 1970s, the art form has
Africa’s time has come You couldn’t ask for a more devoted fan of Fabio Capello than me, but thank the Lord for that over-excitable defeat in the Ukraine last weekend. While the brow-furrowed Italian has turned an underachieving bunch of good players into a remarkably high-performance Roller of an outfit, something of a Lehman-style bubble
Q. I recently went to a birthday dinner. The tables were very big and round, meaning that conversation was only really possible with the people sitting on either side of you. The man on my right, however — someone I had never met before — had something very large nesting in the hair of his
Pity the poor undergraduate who falls into the clutches of Professor Bernard Lamb. The youths might be wizards at genetics but if their spelling is shaky Professor Lamb will provide strict correction. It’s for their own good. Some undergraduates can’t even spell Hardy-Weinberg! Either they forget the hyphen, he notes, or they make it Weinburg.
