New York ‘The City of London is hiding the world’s stolen money’, screams a Bagel Times headline, as bogus a message as that caricature of a newspaper’s other examples of anti-white, anti-cop, anti-male and anti-Conservative platforms. (‘Bid the binary goodbye’ is another pearl.) Not that anyone any longer takes the Bagel Times seriously since
From our hypothetical drone-mounted camera let us look down into a secluded valley in the same series of valleys as Brad and Angelina’s celebrated Provençal vineyard. Cultivated olives and vines on ancient terraces descend to an English lawn encompassing a pretty stone cottage, formerly a beekeeper’s. The lawn is wide and green and must take
We had gone to visit a friend at a stable yard on a country estate on a crisp autumn Sunday. I was going to help his daughter with a pony they weren’t sure about. The builder boyfriend and I drove up a winding driveway past an elegant stately home to an antique stable yard from
Kenya When I was a child in Kenya, the road from the Indian Ocean up to Nairobi was still a dirt track, with the way frequently blocked by a rhino or large herds of elephant. A few decades later, the route has two railways and the road is an unbroken column of lorries heading
Yet again we have been cruelly misled. All the wild assurances from those supposedly in charge that Christmas had been cancelled — thanks to Covid, Brexit, Insulate Britain, leaves on the line or whatever the current mismanaged crisis is — turn out to be complete bunk. Unfortunately, despite no petrol, no delivery drivers and no
A £19,000-a-year London day school was in the news this week because it has started instructing its pupils about ‘white privilege’ and ‘microaggressions’. Apparently, St Dunstan’s in south London, which boasts Chuka Umunna among its alumni, teaches its well-heeled students that the royal family bolsters expectations of ‘inherited white privilege’, asks them to ‘explore’ why
Q. During lockdown I made good friends with a neighbour who I would never have met otherwise. This man lives so close that he now regularly comes to informal dinners at our house. Unfortunately he has a habit of ‘double dipping’ his used fork into jars of redcurrant jelly, mustard, whatever — even though I
Four hundred and fifty years ago this month, a great victory helped to safeguard European civilisation. The battle of Lepanto would be more enthusiastically commemorated if our civilisation retained its self-confidence. For decades, the Ottoman empire had been menacing western Europe. Suleiman the Magnificent was the most formidable commander of the age, and Europe was
The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal history’, in the words of Ian Rushton, the deputy chief crown prosecutor for North West England. To my ears, it sounds weird to call a rapist ‘prolific’. It sounds no better to refer to ‘one
shuffling across the carpark from the pool in my dry robe like a damp, disconsolate Cistercian, I heard them, two peacocks: their proclamations launched wide into the whites of the Cumbrian sky, their maladroit plainsongcutting up the backdrop of chaffinch after chaffinch and as iffrom nowhere, two peacocks: (stately home dropouts? heritage park rejects?) with
In 1966, the legendary adman David Ogilvy set out to buy a home in France. He boarded a transatlantic liner to meet a French estate agent who had a perfect house waiting for him in Paris, but while still in mid-ocean he heard he had been gazumped. There were presumably other houses on sale in
