Other Men's Flowers

When my wife checked in for her flight to Phoenix she was careful not to be carrying any scissors or nail files with her, but Security did n...

Today Sir Norman Foster's building is being shown to the media. All this talk of erotic gherkins and towering innuendos is nonsense. No-...

Farewell then Estée Lauder, who outlived Sir Harry by 54 years and died on April 24th, aged 97.

When a French girl told me that 'My Way' was actually a French song called 'Comme d’habitude' I found this hard to believe b...

In the Observer last Sunday there was an interview with the man who was a junior manager in a small provincial bank in 1968, when he invent...

This one has been on the internet for years but perhaps not everyone has seen it: At a computer exhibition in the US, Bill Gates said that i...

It is extraordinary to be celebrating today the centenary of a man who died a mere four years ago. When asked if there were any special prob...

Those who are not fortunate enough to have The Guardian come through their letter-box every morning will have missed the latest in Simon Hog...

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...