Michael Henderson

One of the peachiest moments in a life of unrepentant tavern-dwelling was my introduction to P.J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. Here was a bar from central casting – Billy Wilder mocked it up, after a fashion, in The Lost Weekend – and the dollop of cream on this peach was the jukebox. P.J. Clarke’s was

The fairground attendant has stepped off the carousel. Amol Rajan, with all his honours on, is standing down from Radio 4’s Today programme, the breakfast show that sends us out into the world feeling a little bit braver, to set up his own company. What took him so long? Many listeners may think he established

The Ship of Fools lies rigged and masted, awaiting departure for Cloud Cuckoo Land. But lo! here come a few stragglers. They’re wearing cloth caps and clogs, and carrying buckets of coal. By ’eck, they must be northerners! Clamber aboard, noble savages, we are ready to cast off. Steerage, purser. You can’t beat a good

Norman Lebrecht, who attends concerts as frequently as falcons swoop over St John’s Wood, has declared 2025 to be a terrible year for music. We are at the mercy of political activists, he thinks, and he has a point. Zealots, particularly those who pursue pro-Palestinian causes, are relentless troublemakers for whom an undefended concert hall

Poor Tom Daley. The cherubic diver, who dazzled as a 14-year-old at the Peking Olympics, turning the heads of Chinese girls like spinning jennies, seems to have banged his head on the board once too often. He won friends everywhere with his easy manner and Colgate smile. The boy next door, people thought, who ran

‘Books are a load of crap’, wrote Larkin the librarian, for a bit of fun. But some books are not very good, no matter what guff they put on the cover. Those promotional blurbs, where adverbs and adjectives jostle for supremacy, are often as false as Judas. Shami Chakrabarti, for instance, plugs With the Law

‘Prizes are for little boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, ‘and I’m a grown-up.’ It’s a pretty sound rule of thumb. The prizes worth having are usually those which reflect a body of work, not a single achievement. Cary Grant, the greatest leading man in the history of cinema, never won an Academy Award.

They have been blowing out candles for Fawlty Towers, and it is meet and right so to do. Fifty years old this month, John Cleese’s portrait of a Torquay hotelier at war with the world remains a masterpiece of British comedy. But there’s another Seventies romp we should not ignore, which was just as funny,

Miriam Margolyes is on the road, bringing joy to every corner of the kingdom, and aren’t we the lucky ones? It’s a kingdom she no longer has much time for, if she ever did, however hard the coiners of trite phrases try to dress her in the garb of a ‘national treasure’. When the tour

Like the fearful townsfolk of Dodge City awaiting the arrival of outlaws, the residents of Notting Hill have been chalking off the hours. Many have resorted to drilling wooden boards over their windows and doors. Some have hired private security and left the city for the weekend. It’s Carnival once again, that annual ritual of

Fran Lebowitz, the apparently acid-tongued commentator on Manhattan manners, will slip through British customs next month to dazzle the easily dazzled. Though to judge by the interview she granted an earnest lady in the Observer, other verbs leap to mind. From this distance it looks suspiciously like a fog of self-regard. According to the profiler,

‘You can always tell a proper lover of cricket’, Michael Kennedy, the great music critic, liked to say. ‘It’s whether they can appreciate a draw.’ A hit, a palpable hit. By concluding a magnificent Test series at two matches each, after India’s victory in the fifth game at the Oval, even England’s disappointed players may

The Proms – the BBC Proms, to stick a handle on its jug – remains a good deed in a naughty world. Eight weeks of orchestral music, mainly, performed nightly at the Royal Albert Hall by artists from every continent, for as little as £8 if you are prepared to stand. One of those artists,

The Irish problem has existed for centuries, though the nature of that problem is not always easy to define. It used to be political, though relations between English and Irish people on a personal level have usually been harmonious. There are still political problems, because identity – the question of to whom we owe our

A great Test match at Headingley on Tuesday, the first of five this summer against India, brought a famous victory for England’s cricketers. Required to make 371 – a target they had surpassed only once in history – they got there at 6.30 p.m. on the fifth afternoon for the loss of five wickets. It

Pop music criticism, said Frank Zappa, was the work of people who can’t write, about people who can’t talk, for people who can’t read. Half a century later and he’s still right. Although pop is essentially a juvenile art form – its clearest strength and most obvious weakness – that doesn’t stop reviewers pumping up

‘Another pint of bitter, love, when you’re ready.’ To those of a certain age the request slips off the tongue like the opening line of a sonnet. A pint of bitter is as English as the first cuckoo of spring or the last rose of summer. It brings to mind a pub, the people in