When Auden and Isherwood left Britain for America in 1939 they attracted much opprobrium and many brickbats. Evelyn Waugh portrayed them as Parsnip and Pimpernel, lily-livered pansy traitors who left their country in its hour of greatest need (though how exactly Great Britain needed two literary types like Wystan and Christopher he didn’t quite explain) […]
There is a quality in human affairs, so rare, so fleeting and so intense that to invoke its name in any context risks derision. To invoke its name in the context of sport must seem especially perverse, pretentious, preposterous and pathetic. I have always flirted with those four mockable Ps and nothing can stop me […]
No, not the 5th and Final Test. Although I am on my way there as I type this. I am thinking about the tests undergone by today’s A level students. I’m not saying I wasn’t nervous about my A level results way back when. I was. Very. I had been in prison, was less than […]
The clue’s in the name of the service: Twitter. It’s not called Roar, Assert, Debate or Reason, it’s called Twitter. As in the chirruping of birds. Apparently, according to Pears (the soapmakers presumably – certainly their “study” is froth and bubble) 40% of Twitter is “pointless babble”, (http://is.gd/2mKSg) which means of course that a full […]
God’s biscuits, but I’m knackered. My gym has taken a two week holiday and I’ve found myself the guest of a neighbouring health and fitness centre. They have unfamiliar machines. One styles itself The Adductor, which sounds rather He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. I have been stretched, strangled and constricted and pulled, pinched […]
Stephen Fry speaks on the history of copyright, his thoughts on file sharing and the future of entertainment.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much indeed. It is an honour to stand before so many cricketing heroes from England and from Australia and at this, my favourite time of year. The time when that magical summer sound comes to our ears and gladdens our old hearts, the welcome sound of leather […]