Gossip
Learning the art lingo: the people, periods and -isms
An aspiring artist turned journalist, Bianca Bosker wheedles her way into the New York art scene – of gallerists, collectors, glamour and gossip
More fevered speculation
Royal gossip is largely invented, says Philip Hensher – but Tina Brown repeats it regardless
Gossip abounds
In December 1979, the 28-year-old Hugo Vickers, dining with a friend, declared: ‘I see little point to life these days.’…
High society and low gossip: the journals of Kenneth Rose
Kenneth Rose was gossip columnist by appointment to the aristocracy and gentry. He was, of course, a snob — nobody…
Why suburban ladies really play tennis
Because my mother is always telling me everything will be all right if I join a tennis club, I’ve joined…
Myths and legends
The Ivy is a Playmobil-style faux-medieval restaurant in a triangular building opposite The Mousetrap; of the two, The Ivy is…
Plutarch on the iPhone
Adults, we are told, as much as children, become gibbering wrecks if deprived of their mobiles or iPhones for more…
Dear Mary
Q. On arrival at a top level dinner, I was surprised to see at the table a woman who, I…
Unmade in Chelsea
Once below a time (to quote the man himself) the bloated poet Dylan Thomas slouched back to New York’s Chelsea…
Playing fast and loose
Simon Blow recalls the wealth, recklessness and beauty of his family’s better days
The curiosity in the cabinet
John Biffen was mentally ill. This is the outstanding revelation of Semi-Detached, a memoir which has been assembled from his…
The baby and the bathwater
Mrs Christabel Russell, the heroine of Bevis Hillier’s sparkling book, was a very modern young woman. She had short blonde…
Real life
Speeding down the farm track from my little country retreat, I came across the gamekeeper in his Defender. I wound…
Tireless tuft-hunting
The novelist David Plante is French-Québécois by ancestry, grew up in a remote Francophone parish in Yankee New England and…
Funny, warm and eccentric
It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war,…
An elegant command
Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know…
The Pepys de nos jours
Frederic Raphael is forensic in his description of the failures of successful people. He is enviously superior and he is…
The inside story
Many books have been written about the corruption, venality and incestuousness that characterise Washington DC, but none has been as…
