Other Men's Flowers

In Great Operatic Disasters , Hugh Vickers describes a night to remember at L’Opéra in 1954: Of all the things that can go wrong with Rigole...

Last Thursday I had a bet with a friend that before the end of the week at least two out of four words would be used by unoriginal hacks to ...

My lifelong search for a faith which would not require me to accept preposterous beliefs, which would add a touch of class to ceremonies (ma...

Divinely conferred power or talent; capacity to inspire followers with devotion and enthusiasm …..that’s what charisma is. It is very encou...

As the Russian poet in a story by P G Wodehouse would have put it: “I spit me of Harry Potter! Gandalf no good!” I’ve just been watching Ale...

This sounds ingenious. But what's it for , and how does it work ? Two pairs of first and second legs compromised of angular members havi...

Good recipes for cooking and serving the Canadian porcupine are very hard to find, as of course are the creatures themselves if you live in...

Last January I asked if anyone could tell me the source of a delightful poem which somehow has stuck in my mind for years. A kind reader po...

As Runyon might have put it, Conrad Black is not such a guy as I am wishing to give the large hallo to. However, it is difficult to ascribe ...

It's profoundly irritating when you have a tune on the brain and can’t get rid of it, or when you know a tune well but don’t know what i...

I had not known, until I read it in a book review the other day, that Prosper Merimée once proposed marriage to Mary Shelley; she was presum...

I have been reading—or rather leafing through, for it has 850 pages and I am already behind with the week’s newspapers—a book by Clive James...

In most episodes of any UK soap, one line of dialogue will crop up whenever some dramatic event is unfolding and its purport is unclear: “Wo...

The first edition of the late Alan Davidson’s wonderful Oxford Encyclopaedia of Food (1999) is still available at a reduced price from Amaz...

There can be very few people who ever had, within a week, a meaningful conversation with the late Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington and anothe...

Naomi Wolf identifies the steps any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms, and argues that George Bush and what is...

More from Watching the English ... Class denial rules We are clearly as class-conscious as we have ever been, but many of us are increasingl...

The idea of global electronic money was invented in 1968 by a junior bank manager called Mr Hock. Wisely, he didn’t give his name to the id...

Those readers who are of a prurient disposition (I’ll mention no names, you know who you are) and who therefore followed a link I gave recen...

It’s not too difficult to grow melons in England, though only, I imagine, under glass. But a travel book of 1607 described them as growing h...