Life
Why I won’t accept the Laurels of Dante
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna I have just refused to accept the local equivalent of an Oscar, which was to have been…
There are no Ubers in the wilds of West Cork
My American guest kept telling me he was going to call an Uber and I could not persuade him that…
Sole meunière: simple one-pan sophistication
Picture the scene. The year is 2004. The setting, a British field or maybe a beach. There is a small…
The curse of Disney’s Snow White
One of the early decisions David Zaslav made after becoming the CEO of Warner Bros Discovery in 2022 was to…
What’s the point in spending a fortune on a wedding?
I follow the YouTube postings of a maverick young economist called Gary Stevenson, author of The Trading Game. Whatever you…
Dear Mary: How do I stop my husband eavesdropping on my phone calls?
Q. I’m quite a good friend of a member of our royal family – going back to our shared school…
The Berry Bros supremacy
For more than 50 years I have assumed that any sensible person will be a right-winger, even if not all…
Aussie life
When Kermit the Frog told us in 1971 that it’s not easy being green it was meant as a plea…
Language
Speccie reader Joseph has written to ask: What is ‘identity politics’? First, the history. The term ‘identity politics’ is recorded…
Angela Rayner’s war on Britain’s playing fields
With the world on fire – not to mention large swathes of the North Sea – it is understandable that…
What does Meghan mean by ‘intentional living’?
‘What are your intentions towards my daughter?’ said my husband, screwing an imaginary monocle into his eye. We had been…
Why would anyone drive at 30mph on a dual carriageway?
After running all the errands I could to help my parents, a letter from West Midlands Police arrived. They were…
A great-day-out cafe that’s good value: Kenwood House reviewed
The immaculate bourgeois socialists of north London – that is not code for Jews – like to eat and drink…
I was right – and Gove was wrong – on lockdown
In an otherwise excellent article for the Sunday Telegraph last week about our government’s hopeless pandemic response, Dan Hannan made…
Dear Mary: How can I check if my host received my thank-you letter?
Q. Annoyingly, one of the Sunday newspapers ran an article about the ‘least used but most scenic footpaths’ in the…
I’ve started a memoir club – in memory of Jeremy
Provence Molly MacCarthy launched the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in the spring of 1920 with two aims. The first was to…
The Sandown meeting that’s a good predictor of next year’s prospects
I never enter a Cheltenham Festival week without thinking of the Irish punter who won enough on champion hurdler Istabraq…
