Guy Burgess

Andrew Lownie spent thirty years researching this book and interviewed more than a hundred sources, as the list of acknowledgements attests.

Five More Pinter

The Pinter season continues at the Pinter Theatre. On Friday I was taken to see five of his one-acters. It was especially interesting for at least two reasons.

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Categorised as Theatre

High Treason

Is it too soon to digress? Don’t muddle High Toast with High Treason; the former an agreeably astringent snuff but the latter is also to be taken seriously. In ‘the good old days’, the existence of which is very doubtful, the usual punishment for dabbling in the latter was hanging, drawing and quartering.

The Roxburghe Club

Few clubs are as exclusive as the Roxburghe, founded in 1812 and limited to forty members; indeed there have only been 350 members in the club’s 206 year life.

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Categorised as Literature

Lush Places

The title is an homage to William Boot’s column in The Beast (vide Scoop, Evelyn Waugh, 1933). Whether it is mild weather or competition from feeders in the cemetery, our avian amigos are not making their way, ‘feather footed through the plashy fen’, to the feeders in the back garden.

Ups and Downs

2018 is the first year since the inception of this website in which stock markets have had a wobble, so a good time to see how resilient my portfolio is when the going gets tough. Anybody can make money when markets are going up.

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Categorised as Business

Egon Schiele

This homage to The Italian Job was part of the New Year’s Day Parade yesterday. But I was on my way to the Austrian job executed by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele at the Royal Academy.

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Categorised as Art

Happy New Year?

Are sexuagenarians prone to pessism? It’s easier to worry about the future than look forward to it, on many levels, but we must keep buggering on.

All About The Income Tax

An agreeable aspect of living in New York in 1983 was not paying UK tax. I was not there long enough to be liable to US tax either. By 1989, when I was in Singapore, this tax holiday had been abolished. I would have had to stay for more than a year. Worse, the Singapore… Continue reading All About The Income Tax

Company

I remember with nostalgia Elaine Stritch and Donald Sinden in Two’s Company on television in the late 1970s. She played a successful American author and he was her very British butler. The only other thing I remember is that she, in real life, lived in the Savoy.