Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
From our UK edition
The phenomenon I’m about to describe will be infuriatingly familiar to older readers, but will have been encountered by people of any age. Even in childhood we meet it, and as we grow old it happens more and more often. So common is the experience that it would surprise me if there was any language
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Guides, maps and tourist fact-boxes often adopt little pictorial symbols: shorthand icons that signal key facts or recommendations. A tiny canoe, and parasol, for example, indicate boating facilities, plus a beach. But less common have been warning shorthands designed positively to identify an unpleasantness or something to avoid. How about (for instance) an overflowing dustbin
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Every columnist, broadcaster or writer should, as each year closes, review his or her net contribution to the sum total of national good. It isn’t vain — or, if vain, it’s the vanity demanded by self-respect — that we should ask what we’ve done to change the world for the better. One hundred and ten
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I was due this week to interview a person I much admire, for a publication I respect, and for a fee I could more or less live with. My putative interviewee was my undoubted superior in terms both of intellect and genius: someone who has for many years managed a career with skill and flair.
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It hardly struck me, as I set out for a couple of days in Somerset, that they would lead me to Bridport in Dorset, thence to Dame Margaret Drabble, to the history of the jigsaw puzzle, and finally to some melancholy reflections on the meaning of life. But of such apparently random pieces are jigsaws
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I have an independent financial adviser. I can recommend him. He gives me expert advice. But I decide, and sometimes I disagree. Nobody would question either the propriety or the commonplace nature of this arrangement. Recently we were discussing what to do with my maturing pension fund. His suggestions looked shrewd but were predicated on
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If you’re me, one of the ways you know that broadcasters are getting desperate for a ‘balancing’ voice to counter a popular point of view is that large numbers of them start telephoning you. You realise they must be scraping the barrel. Never more so, of course, than when what’s sought is that elusive beast,
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I will only ‘Think Bike’ if the bikers can be persuaded to ‘Think Motorist’ ‘29 BIKERS KILLED OR INJURED IN THE LAST 5 YEARS’, says the big yellow roadside sign as I drive along the A515 between Ashbourne and Buxton, on my way to this week’s Tory conference in Manchester. The sign is repeated many
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I’m thrilled to the core by the magnificent tribe whose talents shine the world over There’s something about a flesh-and-blood entertainer doing his nut in front of a flesh-and-blood audience that thrills me to the core. I’ve no idea why. Maybe because my great-grandfather was a pantomime dame. Maybe because I’m a far-flung twig on
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Anticipate the demise of Gordon Brown. Imagine Labour’s search for a leader with voter-appeal. Picture a younger Shirley Williams, but with the experience and affection she already commands. Wouldn’t she be a powerful contender? Couldn’t a new Shirley Williams, updated for the 21st century and reinserted into the Labour Party, give the rest a run
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‘Good afternoon to you,’ says the email I recently received from Mr Dowling of Berry Bros & Rudd, ‘and thank you for your recent order no. 884095, placed through our website, for delivery to Spain. ‘There will be a shipping charge of £66.00 for the case of Wickham Vineyards Vintage Selection Dry White, Hampshire, England,
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Why at a Ryanair check-in is there always somebody weeping? In this case, at Girona airport in Catalonia last week, she was a respectable, grandma-aged German lady in a white cotton-and-lace blouse. She was standing by the counter where you have to pay extra (only cash accepted) if you didn’t tick the right box for
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It is five years since my father died. I thought I would get over it, but I haven’t. This is not a plea for sympathy — I’m fine, all’s well — but simply an observation, a report. Unusually for a man of 54 I had never, before Dad’s death, lost anyone close; and I had
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I was lucky last Saturday at 10.30 to become a West Country pioneer. For some years the Conservative party has been experimenting with open primaries for the selection of their prospective parliamentary candidates. I’ve acted as ringmaster for a few of these, supplementing questions from the floor with my own: a sub-Dimbleby figure, putting them
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Spike Milligan lives. I encountered him last week among the Australian military contingent at Camp Holland: a Dutch-led base in southern Afghanistan, in the province next to Helmand. Corporal Milligan, to be precise. But everyone calls him Spike. And though I’ve no reason to think he is or could be a fine singer or a
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It is good that MPs have second jobs — but they should share the proceeds No columnist should read too much into online responses to what he has written. No more than those who call in to radio phone-in programmes are those who post their comments online representative of readers as a whole — let
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By this weekend most people won’t remember the details of, and some won’t remember at all, the exchange of emails between Lord Mandelson and the former Labour blogger Derek Draper, which took place in 2008 and before Mandelson joined Gordon Brown’s Cabinet, but which was leaked to a Sunday newspaper two weeks ago. What lingers
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We call it ‘antiquity’. And yet, in this imperial Roman city, it seemed like yesterday Call to mind London’s Regent Street. Suppose it straight, not curved. Suppose it about the same width but more than twice as long: a mile and a quarter. Picture it lined on each side not with shop fronts but with
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Sleeping with Agatha Christie and the ghosts of guests past in Syria’s Baron Hotel Do you believe in ghosts? I wish I did, for were I to entertain the flimsiest hope that some relic of a personality could haunt a place where once they were, then I should not have slept a wink last night,
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Every so often one reads in the Times or the Daily Telegraph an obituary of an old warrior that simply leaps from the page. A heroic rescue mission in the second world war, an escape by tunnelling, Burma, Kenya, Aden, a secret journey to Lhasa disguised as a yak-herder, and that’s just the military stuff.