Gstaad At dinner the other night a friend wondered what came first, social climbing or name-dropping? It’s obviously a very silly question, and we all had a laugh about it. ‘As Achilles told me in his tent the other evening, Helen always fancied him and Menelaus didn’t like it a bit.’ Or, ‘I’m rather tired
I go to the theatre but rarely because I am overpowered by even mediocre acting and find it exhausting. Theatre has the same effect on me, I imagine, as the Great Exhibition must have had on a Dorset peasant with a cheap-day return on the newly opened Great Western Railway. But by what strange magic
The sound of something hideous woke me in the dead of night, and I shot out of bed. I looked at my watch, blinking in the gloom of the energy-saving bulb as it grudgingly dribbled out a slither of light. It was 3 a.m. and there was a strangled wheezing sound in my bedroom. I’m
At soggy Newbury last Saturday racegoers were still reliving memories of an epic Cheltenham Festival. ‘Were you there for that mano a mano Gold Cup between Native River and Might Bite?’ people were asking each other. ‘With the likes of Presenting Percy, Balko Des Flos, Footpad, Samcro and Laurina flourishing are we ever going to
We’ve not had an offer from my alma mater Berry Bros & Rudd for yonks, almost a year in fact, and I’m delighted to see them back in these pages with a really very tasty selection of wines. And just for a change, they are offering a six-bottle case this time rather than the more
A paper published last week in an academic journal called npj Science of Learning attracted an unusual amount of press attention. It looked at the GCSE results of 4,814 students at three different types of school — comprehensives, private schools and grammars — and found that once you factor in IQ, prior attainment, parental socio-economic
Q. A couple who live directly opposite us in London have sent a save-the-date notice for a big party they are giving in a few months time. We like these neighbours, despite the fact that they are absurdly grand and snobbish, but we find their big parties exhausting and neither of us wants to go.
As often, a good glass stimulated good talk. We were drinking some promising young Rhônes and the discussion ranged wide, moving onwards from the Rhône itself, to the differences between the UK and our sweet enemy France, then to the merits of democracy and the challenges facing it. Democracy has the overwhelming merit of providing
With the sensation produced by hearing one’s name, I jumped when I saw mine on a poster advertising an Amazon product: the Echo Dot. I shan’t launch a billion-dollar lawsuit to retake control of my name. It’s more likely that Amazon would send the men in the horsehair wigs after me, though I declare that
Nine years ago, before Cambridge Analytica existed, I caught wind of a research project at Cambridge involving the online measurement of the ‘big five’ personality dimensions. These are usually listed by the acronym OCEAN or CANOE: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness and Extraversion. I made a note to go to Cambridge to learn more but, being
