Mary Wakefield is commissioning editor of The Spectator.
There is a joke in the Jewish community about a typical Jewish mother who travels to a remote Buddhist temple in Nepal. Eventually granted an audience with the revered guru there, she says just three words: ‘Sheldon, come home.’ The first trickle of Jews began to convert to Buddhism about 50 years ago. The beat
Don’t worry,’ said our guide, Niels Bryan-Low, his eyes bright with malice, ‘the only time a wild boar is really dangerous is if you get between a mother and her baby.’ A few minutes later, crunching across a patch of orange ferns, there was blur of movement to our right. Niels froze, sniper-style, and we
Right! You’ve got 40 minutes,’ says Nick Wood, Iain Duncan Smith’s spin doctor, in the manner of a game-show host. We are sitting round a table in IDS’s office. Nick has a large glass of red wine in his hand and I have water. Iain can’t have a drink, I soon realise, because it would
Don’t be silly,’ said my learned Tory friend Bruce, leaning across a plate of foie gras and peering at me over the top of his glasses. ‘It doesn’t matter whether they find any weapons of mass destruction; the war on Iraq was justified because it was fun. Our boys were getting bored; they needed a
The country-and-western singer Kinky Friedman has a song called ‘They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore’. ‘They don’t turn the other cheek the way they done before,’ sings Kinky. Had he met The Right Reverend Hugh Montefiore, the former Bishop of Birmingham, Kinky might have changed his tune. ‘It happened out of the blue.’ Montefiore,
From our US edition
I spent Tuesday evening watching Ashley, a 15-year-old blonde girl from Oklahoma, flirt with a British boy called PJ. ‘Wanna see some photos of me?’ asked Ashley. PJ grinned. ‘I think you’ll like them, they’re hot,’ said Ashley, and winked. A boy called Ghetto, whom neither of them had met before, interrupted the conversation. ‘Hello,
I find it difficult to remember, in retrospect, why I thought it would impress Ranulph Fiennes – a man who has crossed the Antarctic unaided and who sawed the ends off his own, frostbitten fingers – if I arrived to interview him on a bicycle. I could have gone by cab and been waiting calmly
Mary Wakefield has been getting to grips with the terrifying but comic world of the Daily Mail’s Lynda Lee-Potter Lynda Lee-Potter was grinning like a lizard in the top left-hand corner of her page in the Daily Mail last Wednesday. Below her photograph was the headline ‘Only one penalty for such evil’. The evil was
After Wednesday’s Tube strike, most Londoners will have decided again that the only solution is a bicycle. But there’s a dark side to cycling in the city. Since I bought my first bike a year or so ago I have been astonished by the outbursts of spittle-flecked fury pedestrians unleash upon cyclists. Any minor deviation