Life
Dear Mary: how can I help pay for an expensive lunch without seeming rude?
Q. My husband and I (both in our eighties) recently visited a carpet shop with a view to replacing the…
The strikers giving Southgate a headache
Poor Gareth Southgate. Having three outstanding finishers is giving him a thumping headache ahead of the European Championship. Harry Kane,…
Can MPs really defect?
‘He did it years before William Donaldson did The Henry Root Letters,’ said my husband querulously, as though I had…
The real reason I don’t drink
It’s been 30 years this month since I last touched alcohol and I still can’t face the prospect of a…
How to make ham and parsley sauce
Poor old parsley sauce. As someone who writes regularly about old-fashioned food, it often feels that we are living through…
Amo Racing’s Flat supremacy
You don’t often walk into a racing yard and find the trainer engrossed with two owners –apropos of horse names…
My parents and the sorry state of the NHS
Pushing through a crowded hospital corridor behind my father, I heard a voice calling me. Then a nurse grabbed me…
Aussie Life
Almost exactly 50 years before James Cook’s first encounter with the Gweagal and Gameygal peoples on the shores of what…
Language
Writing in the current issue of Quadrant magazine, Paul Prociv says, ‘The field of Aboriginal affairs is awash with sloppy…
Where does ‘stuff’ come from?
Pelham, the hero of the novel of the same name (which came out in 1828, the first year of The…
Louis XIV would envy your life
Some things in life acquire an outsize popularity which defies all common sense. The outlandish appeal of such things cannot…
The case for Churchillian drinking
Churchill. No disrespect to Andrew Roberts’s more recent work, but I set out to look up a point about drink…
The struggle to book my wedding in Ireland
‘How does anyone young and stupid manage to get married?’ I kept shouting at the builder boyfriend as I pummelled…
