Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,/ That she may take away all at one swoop,’ wrote John Webster in The White Devil. I find it hard to disagree. I know fortune and luck are not quite the same thing, but I don’t believe the
Basil Fawlty ended up beating his car with a tree branch after doing B&B for years, and I am very near that point after six months of dealing with customers. Among the many requests I’ve had since opening en suite rooms in my house in Ireland I can now add: ‘I would like a throw.’
The wretched flashbacks plague me every time. I love Yapp Bros and I love their wines but line up a dozen or so of their bottles, uncork them and pour, and I’m immediately covered in a cold sweat recalling whatever shameful adventure it was that ensued last time I got stuck in, egged on by
Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve been campaigning for their abolition for five years and there was a breakthrough this week with the Conservatives unveiling a plan to scrap them. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, is going to table an
The UK now has a political class that seems to have lost all interest in sport It’s that time of the year again in football when the Championship sweeps all before it: it’s full of joy and life with packed houses, goals, drama and uncertain outcomes. It’s stacked with great names: Leeds, Burnley, Sunderland, Coventry,
Q. My soon-to-be mother-in-law has started off-loading large amounts of her expensive but hideous cast-off clothes on to me. I don’t want them for many reasons, but we are moving into a much larger flat with lots of cupboards, so I can’t use limited space as a reason to reject them. She is not controlling,
We eat frena bread, hot puffs of flour and olive oil, with labneh, matbucha, harissa and olives Claro is at 12 Waterloo Place, St James’s, and, when I tried to find out what it used to be – it has the energy of a bank – I found an advert from the Crown Estate offering
‘Is it connected to plant-based?’ asked my husband, as though we were playing Twenty Questions. ‘Anything to do with Homebase, drum and bass, Prisoners’ Base?’ I was trying to interest him in the 21st-century meaning of based, of which he had never heard. The New York Times never stops trying to give a new etymology
Through 30 years of living within walking distance of the Derby course I was ever hopeful of seeing Epsom’s status revived to the 600 horsepower training centre it once was with the likes of Walter Nightingall turning out winners for Winston Churchill. There have been brief dawns as when Laura Mongan won the St Leger
