In this week's music feature, we look at wealth, boredom, drugs, sex dolls, love and madness... Human beings, as we know, are never happy, especially when they have everything. TS Eliot writes books for me; King Farouk's on tenterhooks for me; Sherman Billingsley even cooks for me...Monotonous, monotonous. That's Eartha Kitt in a ... Read More...
Month: September 2011
Despite the furore over loans, today’s university students are a privileged lot. As recently as the 1980s, we were locked inside our halls of residence at night, had to share bathrooms and make do without the luxury of even a landline telephone. I was in one of the first years of ... Read More...
Thanks to our friends at Macmillan, we have two signed copies of Peter Ackroyd's stunning new book, A History of England Volume 1: Foundation to give away... Earlier we published an exclusive extract from Peter Ackroyd's Foundation, the first in a proposed six-volume history of England. We have two copies, signed ... Read More...
A renowned novelist, biographer and critic, Peter Ackroyd is one of Britain's greatest living writers. His latest project is the epic, six-volume A History of England, the first volume of which, Foundation, takes us from England's distant prehistory to the death of Henry VII in 1509, and is published in ... Read More...
As I wend my slightly crumpled way through the world, there is one question I am asked more often than any other. Readers of my Hooting Yard website will buttonhole me at bus stops or as I trudge around Nameless Pond, and say, usually in importunate tones, “Frank, why is ... Read More...
From Fu Manchu to Fred Astaire this week, as Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into the East End's Chinatown and the heady scents of opium and white slavery ... It's not so much the slang coinage, because Limehouse as such didn't generate any (other than the rhyming slang ... Read More...
It may be a cliché but that doesn't mean it's not true - the French really are sexier than us. Or so believes Gaw in the wake of a holiday revelation. A Good Year is a 2006 film starring Russell Crowe as a banker who inherits a wine-making estate in Provence. ... Read More...
