The other day, leafing through T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which enchanted me as a child, I was bedazzled all over again. This time, though, it wasn’t the plot and characters that gripped me, but something better: vocabulary. ‘Summulae Logicales’, ‘Organon’, ‘astrolabe’, ‘metheglyn’, ‘snurt’, ‘craye’, ‘varvel’, ‘austringer’, ‘yarak’: all appear, exuding magic, within
What a marvellous summer this has been for Test cricket, which is sadly at risk of becoming an endangered species. The dramatic world of the T20 franchise, fuelled by the outrageous success of the Indian Premier League (IPL), has pushed traditional Test cricket uncomfortably close to the margins. The Test matches began with South Africa’s
It’s unnerving to think how close Britain came to financial disaster last Friday, ahead of a Supreme Court ruling on – of all things – car financing. In October, the Court of Appeal found that motor finance firms could be liable for hidden commission payments to car dealers. If the Supreme Court had agreed, the
As the Telegraph moves slowly towards Arab ownership – 15 per cent to start, and who knows what in the future – I must declare my interest. I’m a Berry, the daughter of Michael Berry, who founded the Sunday Telegraph and became Lord Hartwell, and granddaughter of William Berry from south Wales, who bought the
Rome Last weekend, Rome hosted nearly a million young pilgrims to celebrate the Papal Jubilee of Youth. Part Woodstock festival, part giant outdoor mass and all-night vigil, crowds of students from all over Italy and beyond gathered to listen to Christian rock music, sing hymns and receive the blessing of the new Pope. Leo XIV,
Vatican City In an auditorium just outside St Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, sat solemnly in the front row as a young crowd sang, danced and hopped around to a pop hymn. The cardinal, who is 70, was widely expected to become the pope earlier this year. Instead, he inaugurated
Mohammed Hijab sat at the back of the courtroom and ate doughnuts while his lawyer, Mark Henderson, delivered his closing submission. ‘You will have seen that my client is argumentative, can be provocative,’ said Henderson. ‘Some people might think that he is a bit of a smart alec, a bit too cocky.’ Hijab reclined in
On the campaign trail in the Midlands ahead of May’s local elections, a journalist asked Nigel Farage: ‘Do you have a woman problem?’ The twice-married, twice-separated father of four laughed and said: ‘God, yes. I’ve had 40 years of it.’ His response was characteristic of Reform UK’s leader – a determination not to take things
I’m one of the Silent People who sit on the sidelines of the great political events and debates of the present. We Silent People don’t sign on-line petitions or go on protests to show solidarity with this group or that one. We don’t tweet our outrage, or blog our bile. We prefer to keep what
When the willowy human Feyre meets the faerie Tamlin in A Court of Thorns and Roses (known as ACOTAR by fans), he is a ‘snarling gigantic beast with golden fur’. Drama ensues when Tamlin, with his ‘elf-like horns’ and ‘yellow fangs’, kidnaps Feyre. He keeps her in captivity, then claims her: turning up in her
‘It was a heavy week,’ sighs Thomas Straker, explaining why he recently ended up on a drip in New York. He’s been nicknamed Britain’s ‘bad boy chef’, and his fans love him. He owns two restaurants in Notting Hill and has 2.6 million Instagram followers: not far off Nigella. Another restaurant is coming in Manhattan,
The porousness of the Establishment, and its reluctance to advertise its activities, are illustrated by the career of Varun Chandra. At the age of 40, he sits as business adviser at the right hand of the Prime Minister, accompanied him to the meeting on Monday with Donald Trump at Turnberry, and is credited with playing
This time last year, the UK was consumed by the worst race riots since 2001. It was precipitated by the spread of online rumours that the perpetrator of the Southport atrocity was a Muslim refugee. This summer, there have been smaller protests following reports of sexually motivated attacks allegedly perpetrated by migrants. But something is
Yvette Cooper doesn’t do holidays, which is probably just as well since she is the minister who, this summer, holds Labour’s fate in her hands. During the Easter break, the Home Secretary, her husband Ed Balls and their adult children holidayed in Madrid. Cooper went every day to the British embassy to check emails and
Early on Sunday afternoon at the Epping Bean Café, where a cutesy sign hangs from a wall reading ‘Coffee makes everything better’, a man is enjoying a roast dinner as the staff prepare for violence. Chairs and tables are moved inside, and a tall flagpole for advertising the café, which could be a very effective
How do artists sustain a reputation? We’d like to think it’s on the basis of their work. In the case of visual artists, it would be nice to think they make it because their art is beautiful, original or absorbing. It shouldn’t be a matter of what the art is about, or Benjamin West’s epic
Stockholm This week, the fate of the global economy could have been decided over a Mongolian barbecue in a Stockholm tourist trap. On Tuesday, just 50 yards from Sweden’s seat of government, Rosenbad – where the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng had been wrangling over trade negotiations –
I’m lying on a sun lounger in Monte Carlo and there are so many women with extended blonde hair, hornet-stung lips and bazooka breasts stuffed into tiny monogrammed bikinis that I can’t distinguish between them. They make me feel as though I’m part of a different species. My battered copy of Bret Easton Ellis’s The
Earlier this month, in Haiti’s tatterdemalion capital of Port-au-Prince, armed gangs burned down the Hotel Oloffson. As news of the attack spread, both Haitians and foreigners mourned the loss of one of the most beautiful gingerbread mansions in the Caribbean. Thinly disguised as the Hotel Trianon in Graham Greene’s 1966 novel The Comedians, the Oloffson
When France played Algeria in their national stadium, the Stade de France, in 2001, the French player Thierry Henry said afterwards he felt – disturbingly – as if he were playing away. The game had to be abandoned after dozens of Algerian fans, furious at being 4-1 down, invaded the pitch. Bruno Retailleau, the interior