New York Should art mirror the world as it is, or does an artist fail the public if the work looks back to a time before the grotesqueries of the present? Back, back, I say, but that’s to be expected. I’m such a fan of the past that if I could have one wish
I’ve come back to the empty house for the second time in the six weeks since my mother died. The last time I came back, I felt her lingering presence: benign, modest, humorous. But this time she’s absent. Alison, who came once a week to clean, told me that my mother’s last words to her
‘This is your captain speaking, welcome aboard this flight to London Gatwick. As there is a passenger on our flight today with a severe nut allergy we will not be serving any nuts or nut products for the duration of the flight.’ That was the first announcement the pilot made, ahead of anything about flying
In the second race of a heart-stirring Qipco Champions Day at Ascot the unthink-able happened: on Britain’s favourite stayer Stradivarius, winner of his previous ten races, the King of Ascot Frankie Dettori got beaten. In fact, in going down by just a nose to Aidan O’Brien’s St Leger winner Kew Gardens on heavy ground that
We head to Italy this week and the wines of Castello Banfi. The much-admired estate was founded in 1978 by brothers John and Harry Mariani, and remarkably boasts Europe’s biggest contiguous vineyard, stretching from Tuscany to Piedmont. The 2018 Banfi ‘San Angelo’ Pinot Grigio (1) shows just how tasty this grape can be. I love,
In February last year, Spectator Life ran an article by Douglas Murray on the arrival of a new group of unorthodox thinkers who were challenging the dogmas of the authoritarian left. People who maintained, among other things, that there are fundamental biological differences between men and women, that free speech is under siege on campus
Q. I’ve been having friends to supper for many decades. Although I say it myself, these gatherings have often been hugely successful, with lots of laughter, people making new friends and guests regularly staying beyond 1 a.m. When Brexit started it was OK because talk of it didn’t dominate the evening. It now does. Last
The other night, I dreamt about Brexit. Awakening to the oppression of an urgent task, it took me a few seconds to realise that my only task was to go back to sleep. I described all this to an MP friend, who said that he had done the same several times, as had a number
Lewis Carroll, in his Phantasmagoria, and Other Poems (1869), constructed a poem that yielded a double acrostic, with the first and last letters of 13 words that were suggested by the 13 stanzas spelling out ‘quasi-insanity commemoration’, a reference to an Oxford commemoration ball. The first stanza, which yields the word quadratic, goes: ‘Yet what
Whenever I use the security lane at an airport, I enjoy watching people retrieving their bags and metallic items when they emerge from the X-ray machine. You can quickly divide the population into two: a small minority of ‘logistically aware’ systems-thinkers and the logistically challenged majority. To anyone with a grasp of systems thinking, it
