Other Men's Flowers

“Don’t go abroad,” George VI is alleged to have advised, “…abroad’s bloody”. ] In a piece * published in the New York Times Jan Morris notes...

A recent survey of changing food tastes has shown that many classic British dishes are set to disappear from the nation’s larder. No surpri...

I’ve seen this word a couple of times recently and assumed it was a recent American import; it certainly sounds like it, though of course th...

Last January I commiserated with God-King Gyanendra for the pudding basin he was obliged to wear on his head on ceremonial occasions. The h...

Two of Private Eye's regular features—OBN ( Order of the Brown Nose ) and Pseuds Corner —consist of egregious examples of, respectively...

Thurber's cartoons are timeless:

Writing about roast pork a few months ago, I found myself diverted to lamb: Charles Lamb, that is. Then, after reading the essay on roast ...

Making an impression by wearing a ridiculous hat is not as easy as you might think. It’s not just a matter of putting some jokey piece of k...

An early rulebook of a sport in which I was involved professionally for some years had a preamble which contained the following charming sta...

I can't imagine how civilisation first flourished in the Middle East, or China, or anywhere really hot, because there is nothing like br...

John Julius Norwich , in one of his collections of short literary items sent out to his friends at Christmas, includes this, from the Americ...

Smoking guns were first talked about in the middle of the last century, there was a famous tape so described in 1974, and Iraq was said to h...

Over the past five years many large organisations have moved their call centres abroad; apparently this can bring savings of up to 50% in o...

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...

One of the marvellous things about our language is the rightness of our words. Quite often they look or sound like the thing they represent...

I know it’s lazy to publish a post containing a link to an item in a newspaper without any comment. However, I was much taken with a report ...

“Her English is too good,” he said, “that clearly indicates that she is foreign For whereas other girls are taught their native language, En...

It wasn’t my fault, no-one was hurt, and absolutely everyone involved, especially me, acted with commendable calm and forbearance. Even the...

Football has been driven from everyone’s mind by an announcement from Luxembourg stating that the board of the pan-European steel group Arce...

I normally take the feeds from around twenty websites or blogs, though I look at the updates only occasionally, in idle moments. I was depre...