New York Flaying the Frogs has replaced baseball as the national pastime in this here great country, with Murdoch’s minions doing most of the flaying, using elegant words such as weasels, yellow-bellies and slimeballs to describe our Gallic cousins. It is strange how Marianne’s reluctance to join Hopalong Cassidy for target practice against a bunch
The moment I heard on the radio that Dr Atkins was dead, I was in a caravan next to the beach at Polzeath, in north Cornwall, eating tinned spaghetti on toast. Me, my boy, and my boy’s half-brother were there for a fortnight’s surfing – well, body boarding anyway. On three consecutive days in the
Laikipia Living in the Kenyan highlands during this war in Iraq I’ve felt like those Japanese soldiers who thought they were still supposed to be fighting when they were plucked out of Pacific island jungles in the 1970s. In the middle of Laikipia we live without TVs, telephones or newspapers. Visitors bring us news, but
Dear Mary… Q. I am shortly to give lunch to a number of high-profile people. Two of them have rung to inquire how late they can leave it before giving me a yes or a no. Do you agree with me that this behaviour, with its assumption that a better invitation may come along in
A curious piece of information came the other day from my friend Patrick Williams, the chef and flute-player, accompanying a very English set of photographs of the people of Canterbury observing preparations for the Enthronement of Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop. Mr Williams told me that he’d seen a programme dated 1862 for an ‘Enthronization’
