Other Men's Flowers

The most disappointing present I ever had was given to me for Christmas when I was eleven. Gift-wrapped in thick brown paper tied with strin...

In a few days it will be time once again to burn someone in effigy, and we each have our own idea about who it should be, now that we have g...

Many websites are full of inaccurate information. Whether this is because of the authors' laziness, carelessness or ignorance, the regre...

A Tory life peer died recently, full of years, and there was a four-column piece about his achievements which, however, noted that: X will b...

Happy Birthday John Kenneth Galbraith, former advisor to Presidents F D Roosevelt and J F Kennedy, and the most widely read economist in the...

…or check it out . Americans use more prepositions than we do; our own consumption is increasing but we still sometimes just check somethin...

The excellent Réseau Voltaire has produced a deck (“pack” to the English) of cards featuring The 52 Most Dangerous American Dignitaries , g...

The French call it staircase wit : the flashing rejoinder that would have had everyone reeling with admiration if you had thought of it soon...

A consumer and marketing analysis company called CACI has developed a means of predicting the likely age of someone with a particular first ...

Here’s a picture, taken in Seoul in 1988, of me at a sporting event, explaining some of the finer points of the game to a lady spectator. I ...

This was the title of a piece by Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian last month (except that their subs are not permitted to put an accent in cl...

It would be difficult to think, offhand, of a simple explanation of why a young woman, a total stranger, wearing only a nightdress, rang our...

…continued from Part 2 I was taken to the theatre three or four times during my visits to Pyongyang. The productions I saw were not only all...

An elderly lady of whom I was fond died last year. Our relationship had been founded on mutual affection and respect combined with utter con...

I have long since stopped minding when Americans comment on my quaint English accent, and I no longer bother to explain to them that I don...

At the time of her marriage in 1999, my daughter-in-law Wendy never dreamed that the next five years would put her into so many unhappy situ...

Many blogs feature in their heading a maxim, aphorism, saying, adage, axiom, saw, proverb, epigram or precept (thank you, Dr Roget). Sometim...

It would be absurd to assess the qualities of a holiday destination solely on the basis of what there is to eat when you get there. However,...

Off to Portugal so no more posts for a couple of weeks. Northern Portugal, not the Algarve. I hear they've had mosquitos there, blown o...

I have no need to apologise to my Italian friends for this; it was passed to me by a French friend. One day I go abroad and stay in bigga ho...