Blue plaque spotting is one of the mind-broadening pleasures of British life. A walk to the dentist can be transformed into a serendipitous encounter with a forgotten genius from the past. ‘Luke Howard, 1772–1864, Namer of Clouds, lived and died here,’ says the blue plaque on 7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham. Even if you’ve never heard
Not a single line of this highly distinctive memoir happens out of doors. All of it takes place in rooms: the dining-rooms and living-rooms, mainly, of five elderly, thin, Jewish bridge-playing ladies, Bette, Bea, Jackie, Rhoda and Roz, in a desirable suburb of New Haven, Connecticut. Their napkin rings are made of silver, porcelain, tortoiseshell,
Major anniversary of her birth today, on 21 April. A ‘national treasure’, epitomising a certain kind of stoical, homely, female Britishness. Revered and adored by millions. Her family home a major tourist attraction. A life dedicated to self-sacrifice and the service of others. Plainly but elegantly dressed: not a follower of fashion. Rather severe-looking when
We’ve all done it: been overcome by a sudden sense of hard-upness at the moment when the collection plate comes round at the end of a cathedral service. We fumble in our pockets, feel a £1 coin and a £10 note, and decide that the £1 coin will do. This is a cathedral, for goodness sake,
A boy, a car, a journey, a question: the first sentence of Elizabeth Day’s new novel goes like this: From the back seat of the old Chevette, heading north, the boy asked his question into the restless air. The restless air? The reader makes the mental adjustment: it’s not the air that’s restless, it’s the
I wonder if Cheltenham Ladies’ College is still like that,’ I thought, as I interviewed a succession of 1950s old girls recently. Their memories left me reeling, and I felt relieved not to have been a sensitive girl sent to Cheltenham from an outpost of the empire, condemned to spend seven years being hissed at
It used to be ‘Your M&S’. That was presumptuous enough. Now, when you drive past Earls Court exhibition hall, pathetically covered in plastic sheeting while being demolished to make way for a high–quality, mixed-tenure residential neighbourhood, the hoarding tells you you’re going past ‘My Earls Court’. You can read all about it on myearlscourt.com. No,
The term ‘superhead’ was first used during the Blair government in 1998: an eye-catching word for a new breed of Superman-style headmasters or headmistresses, fast-tracked star teachers who would be parachuted into failing inner-city state schools and paid six-figure salaries to ‘turn them around’. It reaped rewards and can generally be considered a Good Thing.
This novel, John Irving’s 14th, took the sheen off my Christmas, and here are the reasons. The comments on the back of the book (‘Irving is the wisest, most anguished and funniest novelist of his generation’ — Chicago Sun Times) made me feel lonely. He might have been wise, anguished and funny in The
Anyone who enjoyed Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both, with its charmingly loopy monologue of an Italian Renaissance painter prattling away to us through one of the book’s famously interchangeable halves, will be glad to see her new book of short stories, Public Library and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99). It looks reassuringly similar:
Houses, as any plumber will testify, do sometimes blow up in gas explosions, destroying their contents and inhabitants, but would that really happen on the night before a wedding in a swanky house in Connecticut, killing daughter, daughter’s fiancé and owner’s lover? It seems too good to be true —the perfect big bang to set
‘We will have to look at how we are doing things. Will we even be doing prep?’ So spoke Eve Jardine-Young, principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, this summer, galvanised to speak out by the alarming increase in depression among teenagers. It was brave of her even to question the need for prep: in our age
How should a new mother feed her baby? You might well imagine that was up to her. While some mothers take to breast-feeding as if their bosoms have been waiting all their lives for it, others find it exhausting, excruciating and demoralising. Sacrificing every waking hour to nature’s cause, they still produce a mere soupçon
It’s not quite as bad as we feared: Sealed Air, the company in New Jersey that makes bubble-wrap, is not yet discontinuing poppable bubble-wrap. But its newly designed sibling, non-poppable bubble-wrap, surely spells the end for the real thing: it’s cheaper to ship, because it leaves the factory airless and thus can be ‘flat-packed for
Here are two parallel books, both by Americans, both 260 pages (excluding indexes) long, both using ‘likely’ as an adverb. One looks at the history of the world through the story of the chicken; the other does the same through the story of the pig. Which would you prefer? I found the chicken one harder
It is said that the road to hell is ‘paved with good intentions’. Well, so is the typical front garden in what used to be our green residential streets. In the last ten years, 13 per cent of the lush greenery in British front gardens has disappeared; 4.5 million of our front gardens are now
I suppose all children’s authors write the stories they would have liked to read as children. But in the case of this novella about a sensitive man called Mr B who rescues a donkey in Peshawar, names her Pavlova after the ballerina, and brings her overland all the way back home to Wimbledon to meet his
‘I love my new kitchen heart of the home let’s fill it with friends happy.’ So says the thought bubble in the current ad for the estate agents Rightmove, part of their ‘Find your happy’ campaign. Don’t even get me started on the lack of punctuation — or the use of ‘happy’ as a noun.
In recent years I’ve started putting the verb ‘to get in’ (when it refers to the action of being offered a place at a sought-after school) into capital letters: ‘To Get In’. It seems to merit capitals, so much has it become the defining verb of one’s child’s success and therefore future happiness, as perceived
Some of the longest job descriptions belong to rural Church of England clergy. ‘So what do you do?’ ‘I’m the Rector of Aldwincle, Clopton, Pilton, Stoke Doyle, Thorpe Achurch, Titchmarsh and Wadenhoe.’ Every one of these place names evokes an ancient Pevsner-worthy church, smelling of candlewax, damp hymn books and brass polish. Though many villages
