The Tulip

Tulips belong in Amsterdam. This Tulip is a proposed 1,000 foot tower to be plonked down next to the Gherkin in the City. I disapprove of the desecration of London’s Square Mile by greedy vertical developers and this one is the limit.

A Diary Entry

Tuesday, 8th January 2019. 8.15 Have coffee and yogurt listening to the Today programme and checking the stock market. This is a waste of time as I hardly ever buy or sell anything. Send out blog bulk e mail. 10.00 Read more of Stalin’s Englishman. Burgess is now living in exile in Moscow but seeing… Continue reading A Diary Entry

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Categorised as Local

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.