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)
It was in his room in Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1875 that Oscar Wilde said, ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’ Now, more than 130 years after he left Magdalen, with a double first in classics, the room has been decorated in his memory by Robert
Ian Fleming understood the attractions of an English summer. At the end of Dr No, James Bond is in Jamaica, his arch enemy dead, his knockout girlfriend, Honey Rider, about to leap into their double sleeping bag. And yet, despite being in paradise, Bond longs for ‘the douce weather of England — the soft airs,
Some schoolboys used to know about Alexander the Great (356–323BC), how he extended the Macedonian Empire from Greece to India, cut the Gordian knot, and wept when there were no more worlds to conquer. Fewer schoolboys — or grown-ups — will know how skilled, and moving, the art of the Macedonian court was. Now they
Critics have been predicting the death of the public lecture ever since Johannes Gutenberg got his printing press going in 1450. Why bother negotiating the market-day crowds in downtown Mainz to hear someone read from the Bible, when you can sit by the fire in your parlour and read your own copy? The same argument
Harry Mount looks across the Dardanelles and sees yesterday’s weather today In Canakkale — the biggest town on the Dardanelles, where more than 130,000 British, Australians, New Zealanders and Turks were slaughtered in the 1915 campaign — Mark Wallinger, the 2007 Turner Prize winner, has dreamt up a clever little work about memory. On the
Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven curls and smoky-voiced seduction, as she takes telly viewers through the greatest hits of the olden days; recent programmes have covered the Spartans, Athens and the Bible. Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven
New Labour Islington is no more – it is now an area for Tory-voting bankers When I grew up in Islington in the 1980s and 90s, there was a reliable election ritual: the bigger the Georgian villa, the more likely the resident barrister was to put up a Labour poster in his sash window. If
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