Other Men's Flowers

The excitement generated in us by what comes through our letterbox has reached an all-time low this week. In addition to the usual junk mail...

I have already given an example of the economical way in which the French use their beautiful language, and from what I heard on the news y...

Google, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, MSN and Yahoo cannot find this word, so it is safe to assume that the internet has no references to it; ther...

Until recently I had seen this word only on the internet and never in print, Since it seemed to be usually associated with lists of fatuous ...

A friend of mine has told me that a girl he knows downloaded a photo of papal robes, and put them on eBay: Still Warm! Used (but immaculate)...

The phrase "a rchetypal British [they mean English, surely?] gentleman " is being trotted out in many of the reports of the death...

My second example of a person who spent a lifetime doing something very badly and became much admired and even loved for it is Madame Floren...

Isn't this a gorgeous and awe-inspiring sight! Just imagine how impressed Jesus of Nazareth would have been!

If you want your talent to bring you long-lasting fame, and you are not actually talented in any way at all, then it is no use just being no...

I did say that the new pope cannot possibly alliterate as well as the late PPPPP, but some friends and I have been trying to work out how we...

Well, at least Elton John didn’t sing an adaptation of one of his songs, and now the popefest has subsided for a few days as the Vatican mov...

This year is the 250th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Johnson’s great dictionary, which was to define our language for the next 15...

My two favourite sources of cool and unbiased comment on current affairs have been somewhat uninspired of late, but the two major events of ...

I was never any good with Meccano. I liked playing with it, but I was never any good. You were supposed to construct mobile cranes and compl...

"How much obligation lies on makers of historical films to keep to the historical record? How much fiction is permissible within the re...

What a trial it must have been for the media sycophants, cooped up in a small room watching the TV and trying to outdo each other with banal...

Apparently, Karol Wojtyla had a “rumbustious send-off”, the like of which for a pontiff’s obsequies has not been seen since the Middle Ages....

This week the newspapers told us much more than we wanted to know about a whole range of topics: we have been hammered with seven-page Pope ...

Or maybe Kurgistan , or Kirgiztan . But it seems to be usually transliterated as Kyrgysztan. Why? It doesn't help us to pronounce it mo...

Many English people feel that to call yourself Dr X unless your doctorate is in divinity or medicine is barely permissible, though in certai...