Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I came to Italy to write a biography of Benito Mussolini in the summer of 1998 and never left because in the bar next to the fascist dictator’s abandoned castle I met a woman who became my wife. The castle in the foothills of the Apennines looks down on the small town
The funeral director down the lane is also the local taxi service, which partly explains why I see him drive past our back gate so often. According to my neighbours, he has been known to joke ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’, and although he has not gone so far as to have this written
The first week of Dry January was relatively easy. Not falling asleep in front of the television was a pleasant change, as was waking up in the morning with a clear head. I started to remember things I usually forget, such as where I’d left my keys, and began to work through my ‘to do’ list, getting
Have you booked your tickets for the World Test Championship yet? Did you even know it’s on? What seemed like a pretty good idea has become mired in the mind-numbing complexity of the scoring. Currently England, who you might think of as quite a good Test-playing nation, are languishing in sixth place, not least because
Q. A Belgian couple (a baron and baroness, no less) are regular visitors to the Highlands and I have come to regard them as friends. We always visit good restaurants and go Dutch on the bills. Recently, however, they have taken to bringing over two young men who are a couple and neither of them so
The Savoy Hotel is a theatre playing Mean Girls with a hotel attached to it, so you can expect it to both dream and fail. That is a polite way of saying that its new restaurant, Gallery, is not a success, but the Savoy will survive it. Though it didn’t survive the Peasants’ Revolt. It
The language of sailing ships is as treacherous as a lee shore. Words seldom mean what they suggest or are pronounced phonetically. So if you climb the ratlines, you may reach the top by means of the futtock shrouds, unless you can use a lubber’s hole. When Sir Keir Starmer insisted last week that the
Nearly sucking up a woodlouse in the vacuum cleaner, an unseen finger taps me on the head. Surely, it says, you have the time to find a bit of card or an old envelope and move this little fellow to the flower bed? Plucked from the wall, it rolls into a ball and waves its
A generous new Levy deal would be nice, as would English-based trainers producing as many winners as their Irish counterparts at this year’s Cheltenham Festival. But perhaps the most important development for British racing in 2025 is that the massive gamble being taken by the 53-year-old Anglo-Iranian Kia Joorabchian should begin to pay off. Joorabchian,
