What was that about London and being tired of life? Or that flickering ecstasy of a long ago memory of being drunk at dawn and watching people going to work? Surely not at my age and in the year 2013, but there you have it. You can go home again, Thomas Wolfe had it all
Many years ago I met a woman in a train on the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’ line. She was seated opposite me in the compartment, next to her husband. The three of us had the compartment to ourselves. It was early in the morning. I’ve forgotten what the sleeping arrangements had been the night
Once upon a time, it was perfectly possible to ask British Telecom to do something in return for money. You would ring an 0800 number and someone in India would politely accept the premise that if you paid them, say, £70, they would send an engineer to your home to carry out repairs. This used
The Martello Towers — that chain of 103 little fortresses built in the early 1800s along the south and east costs of England to repel a feared Napoleonic invasion — were condemned by William Cobbett at the time as a huge waste of public money; and so they turned out to be, for the British
An American journalist called David Carr wrote an amusing piece for the New York Times earlier this week about the latest British invasion. To hear him tell it, we’ve captured the commanding heights of the US media, including Vogue, Cosmopolitan, NBC News, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News and, of course, the
Many years ago, when I used to work for the Guardian, Germaine Greer, who was then a columnist for the paper, wrote a vicious little piece for the op-ed pages slagging off Suzanne Moore, who was also a columnist. Even in the shell-shocked state that goes with the territory of trying to handle egos like
Q. Is there a tactful way to speed the departure of someone who has come for drinks only, but fails to leave when dinner is announced? Chatting to punters during my recent NGS open day, I made the mistake of boasting that a certain household name, who had been spotted in the area, was actually
Scott’s, Mount Street, Mayfair: the scene of the crime or, for those who do not read newspapers, the place where Charles Saatchi throttled his wife Nigella Lawson in the smoking section, and stuck his finger up her nose. (The Spectator food column, or News Kitten as her husband calls her, is rarely first with a
Unaccountably, people have begun to pronounce women ‘women’, if you see what I mean. For centuries we’ve been pronouncing it ‘wimmin’. The new version has the first syllable rhyming with room and the second like men. I heard that Green MP Caroline Lucas say it when addressing a committee at Westminster. What makes it all
That ‘bullet hole’ in your bush hat, there should have been two holes — for the truth to pass through. I think you believed your own lies, liked how they altered the light on the bullet, as it passed through. Who fired the gun? Who died? Who prayed for the victim’s soul? So many questions,
