New York A strange thing happened to me here in the Bagel last week. Having read the recent review of a biography of Susan Sontag in these here pages, my plan was to compare her with another feminist, Simone de Beauvoir (I have just finished an opus about Beauvoir, Paris and the Left Bank
Catriona and I had agreed that a terrace for smoking, eating, drinking and painting was a necessity rather than a luxury, blow the expense. One of the photographs of an Airbnb just above my price range showed an elegant round table with two romantic champagne flutes and an uninterrupted terrace view of a ridiculous sunset
Nicola Sturgeon, who claimed this week that ‘Scotland is rich enough, strong enough and big enough’ to take its place ‘among the proud, independent nations of the world’, is a slippery fish. She claims the case for Scottish independence will be strengthened by the UK’s departure from the European Union and yet she campaigned for
Proud son of Wexford he may be, and of doughty farming stock too, but the heart sinks at the prospect of seeing yet again Tadhg Furlong, all 20-odd stone of him, emerge from a pile of bodies laying siege to the opposition line to lumber over for a try. Ireland’s brand of suffocating rugby has
Q. I sing soprano in a small church choir, ten to 12 singers. The woman I am placed next to sings all of her high notes horribly flat, and I find it challenging to stay in tune myself. I have thought of moving but the choir is so small that such a manoeuvre would be
The sandwich restaurant Pret A Manger is accused of harbouring centrists. Those are words I never thought I would type, but these are mad days. A Corbyn supporter called Aaron Bastani, the author of a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism — or, as wags call it, Luxury Space Robot Communism — has accused Rory
In the Times, Janice Turner wrote that she had been watching Remainers and Leavers ‘like degenerate gamblers, double down, bet all their chips to bag the purest prize, then throw in the farm and their firstborn child. Anything but fold.’ There is much doubling down at the moment. Beatrice Wishart, a Lib Dem MP, said
