The Negresco is a beautiful rococo belle epoque hotel built around the turn of the last century on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, south of France. Even by today's plebeian standards, with backpacking and sandal-wearing tourists invading its elegant quarters, it still stands out as a monument to ...
Rosa Monckton is married to my old editor at The Spectator, Dominic Lawson, and they have two girls. Before I go on about them, Rosa was a close friend of Princess Di’s, and one who never spilled any beans about her. I once had a good laugh with Rosa over the stuff written about Diana and her ...
From my bedroom window I can see a little girl with blond pigtails riding her bicycle round and round for hours on end. She’s German, looks 10 years old and lives nearby. Next month I am finally moving to my new home, a beauty built from scratch amidst farmland. Cows, deer, the odd donkey graze ...
As a child, the only list I had ever heard about was the FBI Ten Most Wanted. Then a lady who wrote about fashion"Eugenia Sheppard, I believe"made a list of the ten best-dressed women in the universe, and the dam was broken. Everyone started making lists. Lists appeared listing the best and ...
The readers’ Spectator party was as always a swell affair, with longtime subscribers politely mingling with ne’er-do-wells like myself, the former having cakes and drinking tea, the latter desperately raiding the sainted editor’s office for Lagavulin whiskey. But for once I was on my best ...
I am trying to decide with some friends what is worse, English weather or English football. The former is improving as I write, but the latter’s problems are terminal, too many “directors of development” and other jargon-packed non-jobs that interfere with the very simple process of ...
The two most beautiful words in the history of the world, and in any language, are “Molon Labe,” the accent on the second syllable of both words, the b pronounced v in the second. These two little words were the laconic response by King Leonidas of Sparta to the offer by the great Persian king ...
Dancing around an unpleasant reality is what politics are all about nowadays"Donald Trump excluded"with political correctness the enveloping cloud that hides truth and the facts. There are boundaries that are set by those faceless gray men and women none of us ever see, those who control ...
I always thought the Freuds a pretty sordid bunch, and after the latest revelations, it seems I wasn’t far off. I first met Clement Freud when John Aspinall employed him as an adviser for food and wine. He was lugubrious and aggressive, and none of us punters liked him one bit. He was not a ...
Marion, Baroness Lambert, was hit and killed by a London bus last month while shopping on Oxford Street, a cruel irony if there ever was one. “At least a Bentley,” was the way Steven Aronson, the writer, put it. Marion was a very old friend of mine. She had endured the worst tragedy that can ...
