Category: Wine

“Courage, friends,” said George Bernard Shaw. “We all hate Christmas.” These days there is a good deal more to hate about the festive season than there was in Edwardian England, particularly the annual crash-course in consumerism given to all our children by the manufacturers of worthless plastic gewgaws. No doubt the hairy Hibernian sophisticate disdained…

A few weeks ago, central London saw the largest demonstration it has ever witnessed. A good-humored crowd of 407,791 people marched through the streets. These were not folk normally given to protest. For the most part, they were quiet country people, though to be sure they enjoyed their day out in the capital, cheering, singing,…

My grandfather’s grandfather invented kippers. The family tradition is that if he had not sold the patent for his method of making smoked herrings to Woodgers of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in northeastern England for 200 pounds, we might all have been rich beyond the dreams of creosote. Imagine a penny-a-fish royalty on every kipper consumed on the…

Some countries come up so often in the news that you feel you ought to know more about them. There is a painless way to achieve this. Read travel literature. An intelligent travel book provides more enlightenment than any number of newspaper accounts of the latest atrocities, as well as placing in a longer historical…

Bertrand Russell may have looked like God—piercing eyes, white hair, son of the Duke of Bedford, that sort of thing. But he was a philosopher not noted for an enthusiastic belief in the Divine. When asked what he would say when he got to Heaven, he replied in clipped tones, “‘God’, I will say, ‘you…

According to Sir Winston Churchill, the Royal Navy has only three traditions, “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash.” It’s certainly true that until only a few years ago every enlisted man in Her Britannic Majesty’s fleet had the right to a substantial tot of rum every day at midday. It was powerful stuff. The custom went…