Other Men's Flowers

I get a couple of dozen spam or scam messages every month in response to one of the eleven hundred posts this blog contains, sometimes one ...

In September 1938 my mother wrote to my sister  Audrey, who at that time was a dancer, on the stage in Scotland; she had her ninetieth birt...

So England’s cricketers “will take the pitch to a rousing rendering of Jerusalem ”. This will disappoint those who, in a poll carried out b...

It is axiomatic that musical jokes are never funny; this may be because great composers rarely had much fun. But great musicians sometimes d...

Emails from gentlemen offering me 10% of $3 million if I use my bank account to carry out a small service for them have not been reaching me...

It seems that most Canadians have taken the Cambridges to their hearts, and everyone knows what warm hearts Canadians have. Some Québécois d...

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...