Other Men's Flowers

As always, the report on the latest quarterly update to the Oxford English Dictionary is a good read: For me, Tex-Mex food is ugh , but I ...

It does happen sometimes that dog-owners get to look like their dogs. I used to know a girl called Gill who kept a pair of Afghan hounds. As...

...to hipsnotise you? Thus the great Carmen Miranda . She is better still in her native Portuguese . She came into my mind (not that she h...

  As a letter to The Guardian pointed out, the colon in a recent headline was misplaced. The headline should have read: The Archbishop no-on...

With this lovely bit of Photoshopping on the cover and under the title President Windsor , Dominic Sandbrook in New Statesman last month ...

There has been much huffing and puffing about the inclusion of such words as thang , blingy and tik (methamphetamine) in the latest Collin...

Writing a post the other day about the famous New Statesman competitions, I recalled some of the prizewinning entries in (much) earlier yea...

My friend Grumio and I were not among the countless billions who prepared to be whisked up to Paradise last week, or alternatively to be lef...

A friend asked me the other day if I knew the riddle about three men who had to compete in working out whether a black or a white patch had ...

It is many years since I subscribed to New Statesman —in fact, I don't think I ever did, I used to read it in the library—but for some r...

Last Sunday's edition was typical. The front page was dominated by a photograph and an article on Kate McCann, and the "News" ...

I have a PVR which enables me to record TV programmes for watching at convenient times (for example, when I am not dozing, or eating, or tra...

"Nuptial" can mean relating to marriage or weddings , but in zoology it refers to the characteristic breeding behaviour, coloratio...

Feature article on page 12 of the Sunday Times , April 10th 2011: "...research found that 88% of parents feared that children were u...

"I'm sorry if what I'm setting out to do hasn't communicated itself...Listening to the vote this morning, if I've not ...

Interesting to see that Gbagbo and his forces of the Ivory Coast Christian south have been finally beaten by the forces of the Muslim north ...

If I have any kind of individual writing style then it is a careless blend of the highfalutin' and the demotic or even racy; in other wo...

We like naming things, so much so that a multilingual glossary of some groups of names would be a hefty volume. Take insects , for example;...

A few years ago I wrote a post about my first employers and their products  (or, rather, one of them; I omitted to mention another of our be...

When visiting one of the many parts of the world where they speak a language of which I have no knowledge, I always try to master a few phr...