Dear Mary
Q. Passing Buckingham Palace in a taxi the other day, I saw the ceremonial wing of the Household Division prancing…
Low life
I was shown to a room divided into three cubicles, each with a reclining chair and bed table. In the…
Real life
The doctor’s receptionist was adamant. ‘If you had not had the vaccine you would have been even more ill with…
Wild life
Nairobi Since my father first caught sight of Mombasa from his ship in late 1929, at least some of my…
The new insularity
There is something bizarre about a sporting event designed to bring people and nations together but from which spectators have…
Holland
The title of the keenly awaited volume of memoirs by John Martin Robinson sounds like a crossword clue: Holland Blind…
A Rhine art
In an apparently benign — almost prelapsarian — setting, the Rhine is an epitome of the human condition. Scenery is…
Last rites and wrongs
If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein observed, it’s a curious way to structure a novel. But…
Signal failure
Why does virtue-signalling matter? It’s a fair question. After all, if people display virtuous behaviour, need we care about their…
A pretty kettle of fish
The other day a friend asked me what a lascar was. Fair enough: it’s not a word you come across…
The sorry state of the modern apology
I think I would like to apologise for this article in case someone who reads it takes offence. I will…
Bridge
When I started learning bridge (about 20 years ago) I was taught the basic guidelines of play and defence and…
Still the Fab Five
In my second year at secondary school we were all deeply envious of a girl named Judi Taylor because, obviously,…
High life
Isle of Patmos Two hundred years ago last March, the Greeks rose up against the hated Turks who had occupied…
The man who wasn’t there
Craig Brown describes his various encounters with the MP who notoriously faked his own death in 1974
Footprints in the mud
During the first lockdown last year, taking my lockdown puppy for our Boris-sanctioned daily walks, I discovered a love of…
The book as narrator
It is a truism that a book needs readers in order to have a meaningful existence. Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages…
An open or shut case?
Writers of memoirs are often praised for their honesty — but how do we know? I found I did believe…
The chaser and the chaste
Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus,…
A death foretold
In March 2014 Gabriel García Márquez went down with a cold. The man who wrote beautifully about ageing was approaching…
Writers to the rescue
William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…
Barometer
Reinventing the wheels Skateboarding made its debut at the Olympics. Who invented the skateboard? — There are many reports of…
