Twenty-two years or so ago, I wrote a column for the New York Observer, a weekly paper owned by a tycoon named Arthur Carter, a man who had come up the hard way and had made his fortune on Wall Street, but one who had retained his loathing for those who had made it the
This year I was once again sumptuously entertained at the Cheltenham Festival by the racing tipster Colonel Pinstripe in his tented chalet. On Gold Cup day I presented myself at the flouncy entrance and the Colonel, standing just inside, like the custodian of a harem, warmly welcomed me in. Before introducing me to the company,
Never download anything strange from the internet. Never put your credit card details into a site you are unfamiliar with. Yes, I know. But I was desperate. I couldn’t make my father’s new laptop work and having bought it for him as a gift I was miffed. So I started clicking on all sorts of
My son Ludo celebrated his sixth birthday last week and one of his friends gave him a miniature air-hockey game. It’s like the ones you see in amusement arcades, with two pushers, a puck and a goal at either end, but no bigger than a box of Cornflakes. When it was my turn to get
Q. After dining at a well-known gastronomic salon in Bombay with two gap-year visitors, together with two exceptionally pretty girls working in Bombay, we were sitting in a side room, whereupon a gentleman with a straggly beard tried to join our group with the following comment: ‘Eh… fecundity — there is nothing like a polysyllablic
I caught my husband in the act of throwing into the organic waste recycling bucket a little pile of newspaper cuttings I had collected. Slightly soiled with the wet from potato peelings, they still told a story about a phrase of our day: get a grip. A piece in the Times by Andrew Billen, on
According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, every alien race in the universe has independently invented an intoxicating drink called ‘jinantonix’ or at least something that sounds very similar. According to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, every alien race in the universe has independently invented an intoxicating drink called ‘jinantonix’ or at least
