Why is it that every time I leave New York I die a little? I know it sounds corny, but I do. I suppose it’s because it was that first great magic city I came upon after the war. The great beaux-arts and art-deco apartment towers looming in the distance, the magisterial Rockefeller Center and,
Given all the hoo-hah surrounding Prince Charles’s decision to allow a granite stone memorial to be placed in a secret and remote spot on Dartmoor in memory of his friend the poet Ted Hughes, I expected to encounter something along the lines of Cleopatra’s needle when I went to look for it last week. The
Mike Peyton is the author of the brilliant memoir An Average War — though in truth his war was anything but. In October 1940 he joined his family regiment — 4th battalion, Royal Northumberland Fusiliers — and was overrun and all but wiped out on 6 June 1942 fighting a rearguard action in the Western
We all have our rituals. Swans and ducks migrate, the ones that aren’t riddled with H5N1 anyway. We all have our rituals. Swans and ducks migrate, the ones that aren’t riddled with H5N1 anyway. At an appropriate season, starlets and cameramen cluster in Cannes. Canny financiers ‘sell in May and go away’. And invariably at
There never seems to be any shortage of pigeons. Whether feeding in a field of corn or rape by day or coming into woodland at dusk, they are always around. Depending on the weather and the time of day, you may have to wait a while for them, but, as William Douglas-Home once wrote in
For football’s partisans, a string of cup finals have been fraying nerves, stirring spirits, salting wounds and jerking tear ducts. For football’s partisans, a string of cup finals have been fraying nerves, stirring spirits, salting wounds and jerking tear ducts. Now it is rugby’s turn. This afternoon’s European club final — the Heineken — delivers a
Q. We have lived in a very nice, civilised square in south London for nearly 20 years. It’s surprisingly private and everyone gets on well. One of our neighbours is an eminent Liberal Democrat peer of the realm. Unfortunately his wife and he persist in aggressively canvassing and leafleting our neighbours and us, even though
