Marks & Spencer’s Celebrity Hell

Never mind the ad campaigns, M&S is still great for food and booze, says wine correspondent Henry... We should have guessed that Marks & Spencer was in trouble again from their recent advertising campaign. One can imagine desperate executives at head office shouting: ‘dammit John! We’ve got Mirren, Westwood and Twiggy, ... Read More...

American Beauty

This week, Mahlerman's guide to classical music in America... When the Scottish philanthopist Andrew Carnegie built the hall that carries his name on Seventh Avenue, New York City, it was constructed in brownstone masonry - rare enough, when you consider that most of the large buildings around it are steel framed, ... Read More...

Project Habakkuk

Perhaps Boris Johnson could press today's weird wikipedia discovery into action as the new Thames estuary airport? Project Habakkuk was a plan by the British in World War II to construct an aircraft carrier out of pykrete (a mixture of wood pulp and ice), for use against German U-boats in the ... Read More...

The Stupidity of Ancient Egyptians

The Ancient Egyptians really weren't very bright, argues Frank... Two things serve to persuade me that the Ancient Egyptians were a peculiarly dim-witted rabble. There is a tendency to regard the great civilisations of the past through rose-tinted spectacles. One thinks of Edgar Allan Poe, writing of “the glory that was Greece ... Read More...

R.S. Thomas – a great comic figure?

The biography of the austere and forbidding poet R.S. Thomas is a hoot, reveals Nige... It's not often a biography has me laughing out loud - let alone in the Introduction. But so it was with Byron Rogers' The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, which ... Read More...