At Cheltenham this year I was once again a guest of racing tipster and bon viveur Colonel Pinstripe. The Colonel is famous for his rambling, gossipy, sexist, often libellous telephone tipster line, the avowed goal of which (seldom attained) is to send callers home with ‘bulging trousers’. Serious, high-rolling gamblers who ring up his tipster
‘Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in trust I have found treason.’ ‘Good neighbours I have had, and I have met with bad; and in trust I have found treason.’ Thus spake Elizabeth I, that font of pithy regal eloquence who learnt such worldly wisdom without buying or selling
Visiting graveyards on holiday is not just for genealogists and military historians; it’s for lovers of art and poetry, and for anyone with an interest in what their own memorial might look like. Everybody visits the cemeteries of Highgate in London and Père Lachaise in Paris, but there is an almost greater pleasure to be
Order your wines by email There are many ways of buying cheap wine, though fewer means of buying good cheap wine. Supermarkets often have bargains. Recently, however, I went to a tasting by a very downmarket chain — they had Châteauneuf du Pape for £6.99 and a Chablis for £5.99. These tasted of nothing, and
Once more unto the breach! Harfleur, Dunkirk and all that guff is being desperately evoked by the public prints and broadcasters. Goodwill may be suffering from donor fatigue but for one more time the nation entreats the England football team to get a grip. Victory in Tel Aviv against Israel today (Saturday) is crucial to qualification
Q. I find myself constantly smarting — for want of a better phrase — from the presumptions of instant matey-ness one encounters in almost every human interchange in English day-to-day life. Why should someone I have never met before address me by my Christian name? Why should the youth from the local garage who has
The unbeatable duo of Judas Iscariot and Jeffrey Archer have teamed up to bring the world The Gospel According to Judas, published this week at a mere £9.99. The scholastic midwife to this monstrous birth is a previously respectable biblical professor called Francis J. Moloney. He must have copied out the bits from the gospels
