Other Men's Flowers

The increasing sophistication of our tastes in food and the development of such esoteric areas of research as molecular gastronomy sometime...

For seventeen years I was involved as an official in the organisation of international meetings. I was, I need hardly say, quite immune to a...

The first one became Lawn Tennis and the other two became Ping Pong. This last onomatopoeia is not merely a nick-name: the Swedes and the Ch...

Dr Spock ’s Advice To Children is less well known than his other works: Between the ages of thirty and fifty, father often enters an awkward...

It is sad to see that Anthony Sampson, that perceptive chronicler of English ways, in his new book Who Runs This Place? , links warm beer an...

One of my happiest memories of New York is a sign saying “No expectoration in this elevator”, so I was pleased to come across the following ...

Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst are only the latest in a long line of artists whose work has not been appreciated - or even understood - by the...

The other day I watched part of a low-budget hastily-cobbled-together TV programme about how the Industrial Revolution stimulated the develo...

Stressing the second syllable of kilometre, which almost everyone does nowadays, annoyed me mainly because I didn't know why people did ...

In these turbulent times there is a great deal of comfort to be obtained by watching British films of the forties and fifties on afternoon T...

Anyone seeking fulfilment as an artist but handicapped by a total lack of talent should study the works of Goswell Frand .

I once rebuked a friend for misquoting the line about the mills of God, but was chastened to find on looking it up that I had quite the wron...

For most of my adult life I have had a tune on the brain. I don’t hum it incessantly, but it is always there, lurking behind my conscious t...

"I don't know what statements these folks have attribulated to me but I sure as hell didn't make them." - George W Bush ...

Here is a selection from an advice list for journalists that circulates in the United States. Its origin is unknown, but the Pulitzer Prize-...

Noel Coward’s memoirs don’t quote some of his best lines, perhaps because they are apocryphal: Now tell me, Mr Coward, is it true that you a...

Review by William Guipe in West End Weekly: When Façade was first performed, Edith Sitwell declaimed her poems through a megaphone from b...

Dear Sirs ARTHUR PRITCHARD In reply to your query, I am happy to confirm that I have been acquainted with the above for more than twenty yea...

Last summer I was invited by some friends to join them on one of their week-end explorations of the Huddersfield sewers. Not very enthusiast...

In 1982 I bought myself a Sinclair Spectrum and was hooked for ever. Years later I discovered that you could actually do quite useful thing...