New yorker

The Metropolitan Club in Washington is so close to the White House that President Obama chose to walk there for lunch on Tuesday through Lafayette Park while his motorcade followed behind. The lunch was described in the media as ‘secret’, and American reporters were frustrated by the refusal of the White House and the club’s staff to divulge anything whatsoever about it. But nothing the President does is really secret, and his visit was certainly not secret to me, since I was staying in the club at the time under a reciprocal arrangement between the Metropolitan and the Garrick in London, of which I’m a member. As I had been

I remember Sidney Blumenthal from my time in Washington in the late 1980s when I was there as the first American editor of the Independent. He was a smartly dressed, agreeable political journalist, handsome in a donnish kind of way, who had a gracious, dignified manner that seemed to put him a cut above most of his fellow hacks. He was also a liberal of strong political conviction, whose purpose was to help rebuild American liberalism so that it could take on and beat the New Right after its long ascendancy under Ronald Reagan and restore the Democrats to power. It was at around this time, in 1987, that Blumenthal

I was wondering what to write about this week when I suddenly realised that exactly 40 years ago this Saturday I became editor of this magazine. Despite eventually getting the sack, I hung onto the job for nine years, from 1975 to 1984, which is still the longest that anyone has had it since Wilson Harris ended his 21-year tenure in 1953. The Spectator has had 15 editors since him, but none apart from myself has lasted for much more than six years. Fraser Nelson, however, looks set to outlast us all. I am surprised how little I can remember of those years (or perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, given

‘I had had a fantasy for years about owning a dairy farm,’ says Mary Norris, as she considers her career options in the first section of this odd but charming cross between a memoir and a usage guide. ‘I liked cows: they led a placid yet productive life.’ Instead, she found a productive life — if not always as placid as she might have liked — as a copy editor on the New Yorker magazine. In Between You and Me, she presents the accumulated wisdom and winsome anecdotes of several decades of proof-reading, editorial queries and office arguments, ‘for all of you who want to feel better about your grammar’.

I remember the first time that someone stood up and offered me a seat on the London Underground. It was in 2002, when I was 62 years old, and rather a pretty girl whom I had been quietly admiring through the crush on the Piccadilly Line suddenly rose to her feet and beckoned me to take her place. I was so shocked that I responded most ungraciously. I just shook my head in irritation and signalled to her to sit down again. For, notwithstanding the fact that my hair had long ago turned white, it was the first time I had realised that I actually looked old. From then on,

In 1993, when I was living in Manhattan working for the New Yorker magazine, I was chosen as ‘distinguished visitor’ to be a temporary member of the Century Club: there were two of us in this category, me and the Tanzanian ambassador to the United Nations. The Century, in midtown Manhattan on West 43rd Street, is one of the grandest clubs in New York, most of which were opened in the 19th century in imitation of the gentlemen’s clubs of London. The Century was founded in 1846, only 15 years later than the Garrick Club, of which I have long been a member. It was originally planned as ‘an association

The Oldie magazine — of which, until otherwise advised, I appear to be the editor — runs an occasional article about someone’s experience of being sacked. When I was young, this used to carry something of a stigma: other people found it hard to believe that you could be sacked without having somehow deserved it. But since then so many admirable people have lost their jobs for no good reason that nobody thinks any the worse of them for it. And now we are told by Anna Wintour, the editor of American Vogue and queen of the fashion world for 27 years, that to be sacked is actually a good

Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I write an article about the number of New York society types who were bankrupt. Not morally bankrupt, but up to their eyeballs in debt. ‘Let’s get a team of researchers to go through the financials of everyone on the guest list of the annual costume ball at the Met,’ I suggested. ‘We could publish a list, like the Forbes 400, but the exact opposite: America’s most indebted billionaires.’ Graydon didn’t go for it, and not just because he was worried about its impact on his social life. ‘Like who?’ he