Death bed
I’ve built my own coffin
Why we’ll miss ‘Motty’
There’s a sheepskin coat hanging just inside the Pearly Gates. Yes, John Motson has died. That appears to be the…
J.D. Wetherspoons
The J.D. does indeed come from J.D. ‘Boss’ Hogg in The Dukes of Hazzard. But Tim Martin’s reason for ‘Wetherspoon’…
All bar none
There’s more to the pub than just drink
Facing facts
The truth about male ‘competitiveness’
Crowds
London, writes Dr Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes story, is ‘that great cesspool into which all the loungers and…
Football without fans
Football is back — but the fans aren’t. Covid means that clubs have to play their games behind closed doors.…
Band names
You wouldn’t have thought that Starbucks’s pricing policy could influence rock history, but that’s what happened. In the early 1990s,…
Captive audience
This film contains flying children, time travel and a sand monster that lives under a beach — yet the most…
Working from home
Working from home has been on the rise for years. No one expected the latest surge to happen in the…
On the offensive
Mark Mason talks to Clive Anderson about mistaken identity, Macbeth and making a career out of being a bit of a smartarse
Big Ben
The debate over whether Big Ben should bong to mark Brexit isn’t the first time the famous bell has caused…
What is the only London Underground station to share no letters with ‘mackerel’?
Don’t worry, this isn’t a piece about fishing quotas. It’s about the word ‘mackerel’ itself. Specifically, the fact that St…
Why everyone loves Dolly Parton
When her musical 9 to 5 opened at the Savoy Theatre earlier this year, Dolly Parton stayed at the Savoy…
Why I love a bit of death on a Sunday night
There’s nothing like a nice bit of death on a Sunday evening. Radio 4 originally transmit their obituary programme Last…
The unlikely beauty of urinals
In 1966, just as he was becoming famous, Michael Caine met John Wayne. The Holly-wood veteran offered him some advice:…
An ‘I’ for a ‘my’: why we’re terrified of getting our grammar wrong
Jonathan Agnew recently described off-the-record interviews as those where you agree that it’s ‘between you and I’. Last month, Jess…
We have the French Revolution to thank for Ordnance Survey maps
You could say it started because of the French. The turmoil caused by their revolution got the British military worried…
The motorway that contains 2.5 million Mills & Boon novels
The first one was too straight. In the absence of a speed limit, early motorists on the M1 used the…
The great anti-hero of our time: Diary of a Somebody, by Brian Bilston, reviewed
Brian Bilston’s life is summed up perfectly by the incident with his neighbour’s dog. The annoying Mrs McNulty comes round…
From Amazon to Waitrose: how do companies get their names?
Poor Mr Bergstresser. He put up the money to start the financial reporting company but his name wasn’t as snappy…
Stop going through the motions – committees are a waste of time
God save us from committees. They’re an increasingly outdated way of getting things done. But there’s a certain sort of…
Is British food really still wodges of stodge?
‘You are what you eat.’ The old phrase always reminds me of Denzil, John Sparkes’s character in the comedy sketch…
Celebrities, cars and chickens: Inside the Connaught hotel
You may have noticed the Connaught a little more since 2011, when ‘Silence’, the steamy fountain by Japanese ‘architect philosopher’ Tadao…
