Life

High life

The moral courage of P.J. O’Rourke

Was it Socrates who said that chaos was the natural state of mankind, and tyranny the usual remedy? Actually it was Santayana, and boy, did he ever get it right. My friend Christopher Mills has given me a terrific book, The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, about the making and breaking of the Nazi

Low life

The joy of French car boot sales

Every Saturday morning Michael rises at four and drives down to the Côte d’Azur to the Magic World car boot sale. He goes early to see the bric-à-brac unloaded in order to pounce on any interesting old bottles, which he collects. His collection of 18th-century champagne bottles is probably second to none. While hunting bottles,

Real life

Every village needs a kebab shop

‘A diary?’ said the lady in the chintzy gift shop, pronouncing the word very much as Edith Evans said ‘handbag’ in the 1952 film of The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘a diary. Do you have one?’ I was standing in the middle of a shop so like one that would sell a

Wine Club

No sacred cows

Mexico is no country for journalists

I’m writing this on my last day in Mexico City, having accompanied my 18-year-old daughter here for the first week of a six-month stay. She’s hoping to become fluent in Spanish before embarking on a degree in languages in September. My mission was to help her find a flat in a nice part of town

Spectator Sport

Is football hooliganism on its way back?

Forty-odd years ago a friend, a Liverpool supporter, somewhat unwisely took his girlfriend to Elland Road for a Leeds match against Liverpool. Amid some uproar over the referee, she was hit just above the eye by a sharpened coin chucked by a Leeds fan. The relationship didn’t last, unsurprisingly, but she still has the scar

Dear Mary

Food

A victim of its own mythology: Langan’s Brasserie reviewed

Langan’s, a brasserie off Piccadilly with curling orange neon signage calling its name, is under new management after it fell into administration in 2020. It is a famous brasserie — London’s version of La Coupole — once owned by Michael Caine, a famous actor, and Peter Langan, a famous drunk, who would crawl across the

Mind your language

How ‘like’ lost its way

A strange crisis has befallen like. It had long been an object of obloquy and vilification in two functions. The first was as a filler, of the same kind as you know: ‘He was, like, my favourite guy.’ Then it evolved into a formula for reporting; so, in place of ‘I was surprised’, we find:

Poems

Our Fragile Dead

They do not walk the world, our fragile dead: They do not stalk our streets or pace our floors; They do not stand behind unopened doors, Rehearsing all the words that went unsaid. They cannot walk our world as we would walk: They cannot choose to see a much-missed place, They cannot choose to see

Limestone

The statues have been getting wetter and wetter. Always standing (they have no beds), they darken In the downpour. Even if we scrape the moss and lichen From their features as it comes, they won’t get better, But will grow more nimbus-like until the day It is impossible to be quite sure Who everybody is.

My Part in the Revolution

He was from the north and always right. Bet you come from some market town in Surrey, he muttered darkly over our first year Poor Law essays. I was dangerously short on street cred.   Gift-wrapping hardbacks in a mock-Tudor bookshop deep in the privet-lands of suburbia, I ruminated tactics, just as Lenin must have