Other Men's Flowers

I really cannot say why I find this picture of the Rambert Dance Company hugely funny, but I do, I do. Is it the sheer panache , or is it j...

George W Bush has been such a gift to cartoonists that many of them must be concerned about his successor, wondering whether he/she will be ...

This singer starred in a number of mostly unmemorable films , though the Paramount low-budget film-revue Big Broadcast of 1936 also had Bi...

At the Barcelona Olympic Games in 1992 I was a sort of official, so they provided me with a car and a young student to drive it. Antonio sp...

Gwyneth Dunwoody , the longest-serving female member of Parliament, able, fiercely independent-minded and an all-round good egg, died last ...

In 2000 I spent a highly convivial evening at a restaurant in Prague, towards the end of which we asked the little orchestra to play the fi...

These cryptic and intriguing words are part of the subject line of an email I have just received. What can the email be about? It is in fact...

A mantra which was current and much quoted in the twenties and thirties expressed a sincere but, as it turned out, erroneous belief that Com...

Maybe, but the song pointing this out has lasted well; it is a poem by Jean de Florian set to music by J P E Martini (né Schwarzendorf) arou...

( Blues In the Night , Dinah Shore 1942, but that's irrelevant, really) So the pleasingly named Lord Justice Moses has ruled that Tony B...

I gather that the French, or at any rate a few of their literati, are getting their culottes in a twist about an alleged decline in the use ...

It is heart-warming to know that millions of people all over the world watched the TV pictures of the Olympic Torch Relay through London yes...

The general view, and Ken Livingstone's, seems to be that the revelation (not that it was ever a secret) that he has five children with ...

Back in the seventies I was responsible for the overseas marketing of a range of home dyes manufactured by a small company in London, and we...

More recycled posts from 2004: food and drink Recipe for a traditional English dish business How to corrupt an official sport The Victorian ...

During a break from blogging I have been looking at websites again. I haven't set up any new ones for some months because of the travail...

Jeremy Paxman, in his book On Royalty , repeated a story he had been told by "one of the prince's friends" about the boiled eg...

This man, Ma Ying-jeou, a candidate for the presidency of Taiwan, is wearing a traditional aboriginal headress which he clearly believes may...

Four years ago I discovered that My Way was a French song and posted a rather feeble note remarking unjustifiably that the French words di...

I have long hated the taste and smell of this without ever having heard of it, for I have only just discovered that it is another name for ...