Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
Hugo Rifkind on the party conference season Are we sure that party conferences are good things? Are we convinced that they do the job? Certainly, they are great fun. That, I would never dispute. The booze. The talk. And the rooms. Any connoisseur of weird, shabby, out-of-town hotels with ominously crumbly ceilings and carpets that suck
Why does Gordon Brown have a ‘big tent’? Why does Gordon Brown have a ‘big tent’? Why, to be pertinent, does he have a ‘tent’ at all? There must have been leaders, throughout world history, who have ruled calmly and inclusively and by consensus. Yet if we were to group these people together on a Venn diagram,
How on earth did they get them through customs? ‘Oi! You there! Chinese-looking fellow! What we got here, then? Ah. Toy soldiers, is it? Chewable? No? Oh dear. How on earth did they get them through customs? ‘Oi! You there! Chinese-looking fellow! What we got here, then? Ah. Toy soldiers, is it? Chewable? No? Oh
You will have smirked. Shame on you, but you will. Yet reluctantly, and out of respect for the recently deceased, I intend to tread lightly over the story of the Australian pet collector killed earlier this week by her own overamorous camel. I shall note, with a restrained interest, the use of the word ‘humped’
There was a photograph in one of the Sunday papers, and it caught my eye. It showed a cheery bald man in some drowned Gloucestershire village traversing the floodwater on a penny-farthing. Hmm, I thought to myself, almost immediately, I bet that’s faked.I should be careful here. The kind of man who would ride baldly
There are things which fashion can teach us. Real things. Not just things about puce after a heavy lunch, or the invariable inadvisability of headwear. Things about choice, and belief, and about how we approach the world. Consider this. Last weekend, slaloming through the Glastonbury fudge, I kept seeing people who were dressed as pirates.
There is a thing that many Scots do when they meet with other Scots. They start to sound more Scottish. Their consonants either grow jagged or fade away all together, their vowels twist, collude and extend. They start to say ‘aye’ in place of ‘yes’. They may even, if among friends, be tempted to risk