New York Here’s a question for you loyal readers: if a hubby asks his wife to cook him a hearty meal of goat meat and she serves him lentils instead, is he within his rights to beat her to death with a stick, as a New Yorker who is on trial this week did? Mind
I was two days alone in the caravan and no signal or reception of any sort. It was like a Buddhist silent retreat, where you have to listen in horrified amazement to your own thoughts. During the day I walked the cliff path; in the evenings I sat on the caravan steps wishing I had
In the end, I threw my mobile phone into a sack of Chudley’s dog biscuits. It was the only way I could finish the book. The bag of Chudley’s was in a cupboard so it didn’t even matter that I hadn’t silenced the phone before I threw it in there. At most, all I could
London’s opera critics have been roundly condemned for suggesting that a female singer’s personal appearance could make her unsuitable for a role. The singer in question is Tara Erraught, a young Irish mezzo-soprano based in Germany, who has just made her British debut in the new Glyndebourne production of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. She takes
Eight people became millionaires last Saturday, collecting £1,342,599 each when the Scoop6 bet, which had been rolled over for 12 weeks without a winner, was finally won. With racing’s narrative having been dominated for weeks by the gamble to find six winners on the day, there was more than £16 million in the pot: £11
I suppose I should be grateful that the liberal intelligentsia doesn’t bother to check any of the facts if an opportunity presents itself to attack Michael Gove. They have a fixed idea about him, which is that he’s a Tory philistine who wants to turn the clock back to the 1950s, and they leap on
There are mixed views — to put it mildly — concerning the quality of the 2013 Bordeaux vintage. It’s not a complete write-off by any means, for there are certainly decent wines to be had that will make enjoyable mid-term drinking. But in the main the wines are pricey, they’re not for keeping and it’s
Ah teamwork! There’s no me in team, as David Brent used to observe sagely, but there are often plenty of cocks, as he didn’t. And really, you get to thinking, Lewis Hamilton ought to start sorting himself out. He whines and moans just a tad too much. Watching Lewis and Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg on
Q. Two acquaintances of mine have somehow inveigled their way into my dining circuit. They are men who, despite privilege and early promise, have made failures of their lives, but my goodness they both believe they have a story to tell. It’s not just tedious, but they bore with a ferocity that feels ideological in
Harry’s Bar is a dull pale box. This is remarkable in Venice, which is a hospice for dying palaces, held up aching over the world’s most charismatic puddle; Harry’s is a transgressive anti-palazzo. It is a world-famous restaurant, the jewel of the Cipriani brand, and it is very conscious of this honour; it sells branded
When I asked my husband why paramedical professions were given to remaking the language in strange ways, he replied in a threatening tone ‘Whadya mean?’ I think he was in denial. But it is undeniably true that where two or three trained counsellors or disability campaigners are gathered together, the first victim will be the
All spring the scattered bands gathered, the People, the Human Beings, all those like themselves on this earth — Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho. Movement and magnetism, wildness in the air, the power of the buffalo and the People swarming and flowing north to the sweetness of the old land and the old ways, up
