The British weather is just like the worst boyfriend. The kind that keeps you in a state of permanent insecurity over their intentions. ‘See you later,’ they say blithely on departing in the morning, a comment that could equally well mean after lunch, or sometime in the second half of the year. Our programming for
The swifts had not arrived by June, nary a one, though a Yorkshire Dales friend reported their return, and there were masses in France. I read that there was a national shortage, bird people were doing surveys and panicking. In the 1970s and 1980s, swifts wheeled round every church tower, dashed through the streets screaming.
Surely there is a bit of humbug in this outrage about the two remaining jihadi Beatles, Kotey and Elsheikh, and Sajid Javid’s difficult but correct decision to send them for trial in America. Suppose the grisly pair had been located a couple of years ago in Raqqa. And let’s suppose there was a Reaper drone
It was blessedly cool inside the Romanesque nave, its massive arches resisting the heat as they had done everything else that history had thrown at them in the past thousand years. Through the great west doors, which had been left open for ventilation, I could glimpse the ruins of the adjacent Norman castle, bleached white
Well, we did it. No, not Brexit, the World Cup or my (somewhat less) ambitious scheme at Legal & General to interest the nation in investing. Not yet at least. But we did reach the end of term — and the end of the school year. With three out of our nine children leaving their
Happy 190th birthday, dear Spectator. And in what fine health you are, at such an advanced age. This was hardly inevitable when I joined the magazine, as deputy editor, in 1987. It was just about to mark its 160th year of unbroken losses, a corporate world record which I don’t see being matched by any
In this gloriously sunny week, the cavalry horses are off on their summer break to Bodney, Norfolk. They can be seen prancing across Holkham beach, scattering oyster catchers, pushchairs, Cath Kidston picnics and naturists. Everybody loves to see the horses, some plunging into the sea, others shying gingerly from the spray. I am especially keen,
At Chequers last week to interview the Prime Minister, I hear some sad news of Churchill’s mouse. The story goes that the rather fine painting there by Rubens and Frans Snyders, illustrating Aesop’s fable of the lion and the mouse, was ‘touched up’ by Winston himself. During the war, staring at the painting, Churchill decided
Awake to the Today programme and ordure being dumped on me by Polly Toynbee while the Mail’s legendary Dame Ann Leslie sings my praises. I recall how Toynbee penned a venomous piece about my predecessor, Sir David English, only days after he died at 67 (though, through a slip in the actualité, his Who’s Who
I know some people are fretting about Brexit, and others about the drive-by violence the President is doing to the US constitution, but what preoccupies me and the nation’s allotment-holders at the moment is news that the RHS is warning of a ‘bumper year for slugs’. The slimy little bastards not only ate every single
By 74 it is easy to feel that you have seen it all, done it all, that nothing much surprises you any more. Striving gives way to coping. Drop a pencil and it rolls under the sofa. What you have to do is think about the best way to find it and pick it up.
Monday morning. Sitting in Ed the physio’s waiting room. He is theatreland’s go-to man for fractured bones and torn muscles — essentially, an MOT garage for weary actors. A herd of cast members from The Lion King hobble in; the expression ‘suffering for your art’ comes to mind. I hurt my knee playing on all
The family ranch, which my father acquired when I was about six years of age, lay along the banks of the Kafue river in northern Rhodesia. Immediately above the river it was swampland. Then it rose up into ranching country where there were good, thick strands of what was then known as Rhodesian grass —
I spend my life moving. Over recent years it was research. Now it’s caused by that research. But I have become adept at adding things on to each trip. In Naples at the weekend, I visited the Sansevero chapel which contains the ‘veiled Christ’ of Sanmartino — a work Canova said he would have given
After reading Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, Somerset Maugham remarked: ‘That young man holds the future of the English novel in his hands.’ Isherwood never quite fulfilled his early promise, but Lions and Shadows remains an entrancing book. I relish in particular the history teacher, of whom Isherwood recorded: ‘Almost everything Mr Holmes did or
Dining in splendour beneath Van Dycks as we forked in the delicious venison, it was hard not to agree with my neighbour that we were in illustrious company and in one of the most beautiful rooms in England. Our hosts had, however, as we agreed, been bold in the choice of multinational guests, many of
Our ducks are back. Two wild mallard have spent the last five springs on the brook which gurgles past us in Herefordshire. Each year they produce a paddling of chicks; each year most of the ducklings are killed by predators. Our friend Becky thinks she spotted an otter, more likely stoat or mink, in the
If you write a book, even a novel, about Shakespeare you must at least consider the theory that Will of Stratford was not the author of the plays. The arguments for that seem nonsensical to me, but they appeal to conspiracy theorists who, a couple of hundred years from now, will probably contend that Joanne
When the much-admired (and very tall) literary agent Gillon Aitken died in October 2016, he left most of his estate in a charitable trust to be named after his daughter Charlotte, who had, very sadly, predeceased him. Quite soon, the trust will start its work, which is to ‘educate the public in the appreciation of
On the gently lapping shores of the Persian Gulf, in the steely shadow of the Burj Khalifa, I bump into former chief inspector of schools Sir Michael Wilshaw: I in my dishevelled blue trunks, he in his well-fitted white T-shirt (always strong on uniforms). We are guests of the Varkey Foundation’s global summit on education
