When a lame-duck draft dodger pardoned a major crook and fugitive —along with his very own drug-dealing half-brother — American public opinion was righteously outraged. It was par for the course for Bill Clinton, but at least he didn’t saddle the country with anything worse than having to put up with a ghastly person like
‘Can anyone name Tony Soprano’s horse?’ says Marc Baron, our tour guide, standing in the aisle of a leaking coach at the start of The Sopranos Bus Tour of New Jersey. The answer of course is Pie-O-My, and because we’re all addicts of the TV series, The Sopranos, we all know the name and shout
A decent beach should not be too decent. An overload of litter is of course disgusting, but a light scattering — a crisp packet here, a Fanta can there — pleasingly negates any pretentious fantasy of being at one with nature. The Croatian Tourist Board has struck the right balance on the island of Vis,
There’s nothing like a free holiday. Thanks to a banking ‘cash-rich, time-poor’ brother, a girlfriend and I jumped on a plane and headed to his empty finca in the hills of Ibiza. Our mission was to give it a lick of paint in return for a fortnight’s free board. The pool was green and fetid
‘Look at this,’ I said. ‘“Key management”. What’s that all about?’ My wife winced. ‘I suppose it’s about key management,’ she said, and immediately returned to her book. We were halfway to Rome and I was reading the user manual for the apartment we had taken for the weekend. It ran to 11,652 words and
The weather may be bizarre at the moment, but when the sun comes it seems particularly warm, which is when you will crave these excellent wines. They have been selected for summer drinking by Amanda Skinner of Lay & Wheeler, one of our most popular merchants. They are perfect for parties, barbecues, picnics or as
How went our ‘Last Smoke’ dinner on Thursday, hosted by the Spec’s Andrew Neil at London’s swish Four Seasons Hotel? If not so grand, there were doubtless other such tobacco requiems all around the country. Nicely apt, somehow, that Nanny Blair’s smoking ban coincides with her own cursing, unlamented departure from the nursery. All ‘final
Q. My wife and I have just given a summer party to which we invited around 200 people. Correction — we posted invitations to 200, 20 of whom rang up on the day to say they had not received their invitation, but could they come anyway? Now that the party is over we wonder about
The poet Hugo Williams, in an entertaining ramble around changes in language in the TLS the other day, noted that curate’s egg is now widely used to mean ‘a mixed blessing’, which is far from the intention of its originator, the cartoonist George Du Maurier (Punch, 9 November 1895). Du Maurier, that grand old bohemian,
