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What Kate should know

Kate Middleton and Prince William are widely expected to announce their engagement in 2007. Patrick Jephson, who was Diana’s private secretary, says there is much the original ‘People’s Princess’ could tell the next queen-in-waiting ‘Perhaps Miss Middleton … will be our future queen,’ I speculated in a Sunday newspaper nearly three years ago. The editor

‘I have kept a sense of wonder’

One night early in the run of Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, Claire Bloom tripped on the stage of the Haymarket theatre in the West End and fell flat on her face. ‘I managed to get up and the audience was kind enough to applaud,’ she says in that impeccable Received Pronunciation that is

The smart boy thrilled by the story

Charles Moore pays tribute to his friend Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator 1995–99, who died on 15 December: a man of awesome learning — and light touch ‘In the Fifties, job advertisements used to read “smart boy wanted”. That’s me,’ Frank Johnson would say. The joke tells you a good deal about Frank. First,

Blair hasn’t got the hang of democracy

Rod Liddle says that the Prime Minister’s Christmas jaunt to the Middle East epitomised his confusion about what happens when people who hate you get the chance to say so in elections As our Prime Minister is someone whose confused political instincts stretch little further than a belief in democracy and freedom of choice, it