Harry Mount is editor of The Oldie and author of How England Made the English (Penguin) and Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever (Bloomsbury)
The United States is almost as segregated under Obama as it was in the time of Martin Luther King As I arrived in New Orleans this summer, there was a juicy racism row blazing across the airwaves and the blogosphere. Like lots of the juiciest rows, it was over a little thing. The question was,
You might not have been to Freshwater West, on the remote western shores of Pembrokeshire, but you’ve probably seen it before — on the big screen. Because the bay is so untouched by man, it can stand in for pretty much any period in history. It’s just starred as the medieval beach in Russell Crowe’s
Tim Waterstone is the man who set up the bookshop chain in 1982, so you might expect him to have read a few books, and be OK at writing them. In fact, he’s more a businessman than a writer. He began life as a broker in Calcutta, before becoming marketing manager for Allied Breweries and
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the continental midday sun. But at least the mad dogs don’t dress in vests, belly-hugging T-shirts or those cut-off trousers that make short men shorter and fat men fatter. Why do they do it? How has it happened that you can spot Holidaymakerus britannicus in an instant, from
The Greek and Roman Collections Sculpture Promenade 2010 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 28 January 2011 Virgil was wrong — don’t be afraid of Greeks bearing gifts, particularly if you’re a British regional museum. While our government has cut its grant to the Fitzwilliam by two per cent, Greek zillionaires have stepped admirably into the breach
Harry Mount watches Nick Griffin try to win round the disgruntled former Labour voters of Dagenham and Barking — if he wasn’t so ridiculous, he might be dangerous As always, P.G. Wodehouse got it right. Far-right groups are unlikely to take off in Britain because, for all their nastiness, they always come across as just
Ronald Searle, who turned 90 this month, talks to Harry Mount about being captured by the Japanese, chronicling the 1950s and inventing both St Trinian’s and Molesworth High in the mountains of Provence, in a low-ceilinged studio at the top of his teetering tower house, Ronald Searle is showing me the simple child’s pen he
If Gordon Brown really wants to start appealing to the middle-class vote, he could start by picking up my rubbish. The bin bags outside my flat in Kentish Town, north London, weren’t collected for four weeks over Christmas because of the snow. When the foxes started to rip them apart and left a trail of
After more than 200 years, a uniquely British taste is on the way out. Shabby chic has been vacuumed, whitewashed and dry-cleaned out of existence. Frayed shirt collars, egg yolk on the tie, soup stain on the crotch, roses rambling out of control over the crumbling terrace flagstones, walls cluttered with pictures, tables covered with
How can we expect our children to grow up, asks Harry Mount, when British culture is becoming increasingly babyish — full of primary colours and little letters It first struck me how babyish modern Britain has become when I got a flyer through my door about a new doctors’ surgery in Kentish Town, my patch
In the hall at Aberglasney — a fine, classical country house, built in 1720, 20 miles north-west of Swansea — high up by the cornice, an elaborate chunk of plasterwork is missing. To give the full catalogue entry, it is a rococo console, carved with twirling honeysuckles, a motif dear to the ancient Greeks. I know, to
Harry Mount celebrates the 60th anniversary of Carol Reed’s masterly film The Third Man with a tour of Harry Lime’s postwar Vienna — the true star of the movie Vienna Six times a week, the Burg Kino cinema in Vienna shows The Third Man in its small Studio Theatre. ‘It’s best that you book,’ said
These days, Charles Pooter, the City clerk and narrator of George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody (1892) — the enduring comedy of hum-drum middle-class, late-19th-century life — could never afford to rent (or buy) his six-bedroom house, The Laurels, in Brickfield Terrace, Holloway. The Pooters of this world fled north London a
But private schools, private tutors and bestselling books are filling the vacuum, says Harry Mount. Larkin was right: there is a hunger in us all ‘to be more serious’ The decline of the British education system has been my gain, I’m only partly ashamed to confess. As somebody who has published a jokey book about
Fifty years ago, when the Irish Georgian Society was founded, the bulldozer was a familiar sight in Ireland, trundling along elegant urban terraces and drawing up at the gates of country houses. One of the bulldozer’s prominent Dublin victims half a century ago was No. 2 Kildare Place. This 1751 gem, just next to the
Beyond the Work of One — Oxford College Libraries and their Benefactors The Bodleian Library, Oxford, until 1 November, admission free A few years ago, my old tutor, the much- missed Angus Macintyre of Magdalen College, gave me a letter that meant I could get into the Codrington Library — Nicholas Hawksmoor’s 1716 gem at
Just outside Florence’s city walls, marooned in the middle of a huge great ring road, lies a foreign field that is for ever England. Well, it’s really for ever Switzerland. The English Cemetery of Florence is owned by the Swiss Reformed Evangelical Church and is officially called the Protestant Cemetery of Florence. But, because the
‘Mr White Man’s Time’ would be a pretty racist nickname if it hadn’t been invented by black Africans. In Ivory Coast, though, it’s a term of some distinction. The nickname belongs to Narcisse Aka, a legal adviser aged 40, who has just won the country’s hallowed Punctuality Night competition — and a £30,000 villa —
Deep in a remote valley on the edge of the Black Mountains sits one of the last great witnesses of the 20th century. Lady Mary Clive, who turns 100 on 23 August, shook Kitchener’s hand before the first world war, and heard first-hand accounts of the 1916 Dublin Easter Uprising hours after it happened. During
It’s four in the afternoon in the Garrick Club and Norman Stone is steaming with rage. The steam is not alcohol-fuelled. Professor Stone — historically no flincher from the glass — is on the wagon at the moment but is feeling no undue withdrawal pangs. He is, though, longing for a cigarette, and his beloved