'Too Fat Polka', and other politically incorrect songs of the 1940s
When I was a child, growing up in Hertfordshire just after the second world war, my parents employed a cook…
Alexander Chancellor: Why aren't Italians angrier about Nazi atrocities?
Given that more than 9,000 innocent Italian civilians, many of them women and children, died in Nazi massacres during the…
Alexander Chancellor: I don’t like traffic jams or lager louts but that doesn’t mean I hate Britain
The Italians are often thought of as being unpatriotic, and one can see why. They relentlessly denigrate their national institutions,…
Good news from Alexander Chancellor’s menagerie
There is at last good news to report on the poultry front. In the past, when I have mentioned my…
Alexander Chancellor: The Kindle is marvellous, but it cannot satisfy an addiction to books
My brother John’s great book sale, about which I wrote on this page a couple of weeks ago, finally took…
Alexander Chancellor: It seemed a little creepy that thousands of people wanted to
My village, Stoke Bruerne in south Northamptonshire, is just getting back to normal after a great influx of visitors for…
Alexander Chancellor: Pursued around the world by a thousand books
It is exactly 40 years since my elder brother John gave up a successful career as a publisher to set…
Alexander Chancellor: what’s wrong with the word ‘toilet’?
I am embarrassed not by people using ‘non-U’ expressions but by people who still care about such things
Alexander Chancellor: Why was Bradley Manning ever allowed to join the army?
I have been puzzling about why the United States authorities ever thought that Bradley Manning, who was jailed last week…
Alexander Chancellor Why can’t we have more public toilets and fewer wheelie-bins?
After a carefree month at my wife’s house in Tuscany — the longest summer holiday I have spent there for…
How can you be racist and Italian? Quite easily, it seems
The Italian shop assistant accused by Oprah Winfrey of showing racial prejudice towards her in a shop in Zurich has…
Alexander Chancellor: I found the key to holiday happiness in a car park
While sitting beside a pool under a blistering Tuscan sun, I’ve been reading an article in Corriere della Sera about…
Why don’t the Italians ask me to translate their restaurant menus?
When we bought the farmhouse in Tuscany, where I am now, more than 40 years ago, there were only two…
The Annals of Unsolved Crime, by Edward Jay Epstein - review
Edward Jay Epstein is an American investigative journalist, now in his late seventies, who has spent at least half a…
Romans always love a Vatican scandal. But what if this time they're right?
The people of Rome have always liked to believe the worst of their bishop. When I was a correspondent in…
Alexander Chancellor: Seduced by a Benson & Hedges packet aged 16
The government has done a puzzling U-turn over its plan to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes. It had seemed determined…
Long life: Putin, Saatchi, Murdoch...hell hath no fury like an old man scorned
The days may be long gone when a husband would pretend to commit adultery in a Brighton hotel so as…
Long life: The curse of the black tie
I seem to have been steeped in opera lately. First there was Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne, then Peter Grimes…
