Neighbourhood Watch
The terrific 1958 Peter Sellers skit ‘Balham, Gateway to the South’, written by Frank Muir and Denis Norden, has lost some of its power these days. Sellers’s commentary — he plays a portentous American...
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The ominous creep of Baby Chic
How can we expect our children to grow up, asks Harry Mount, when British culture is becoming increasingly babyish — full of primary colours and little letters It first struck me how babyish modern...
View ArticleThe death of ‘shabby chic’
After more than 200 years, a uniquely British taste is on the way out. Shabby chic has been vacuumed, whitewashed and dry-cleaned out of existence. Frayed shirt collars, egg yolk on the tie, soup stain...
View ArticleConfessions of a middle-class anarchist
If Gordon Brown really wants to start appealing to the middle-class vote, he could start by picking up my rubbish. The bin bags outside my flat in Kentish Town, north London, weren’t collected for four...
View Article‘I went into the war as a student and came out as an artist’
Ronald Searle, who turned 90 this month, talks to Harry Mount about being captured by the Japanese, chronicling the 1950s and inventing both St Trinian’s and Molesworth High in the mountains of...
View ArticleBarking mad — a day out with the BNP
Harry Mount watches Nick Griffin try to win round the disgruntled former Labour voters of Dagenham and Barking — if he wasn’t so ridiculous, he might be dangerous As always, P.G. Wodehouse got it...
View ArticleClassic treasure
The Greek and Roman Collections Sculpture Promenade 2010 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 28 January 2011 Virgil was wrong — don’t be afraid of Greeks bearing gifts, particularly if you’re a...
View ArticleDressing down
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the continental midday sun. But at least the mad dogs don’t dress in vests, belly-hugging T-shirts or those cut-off trousers that make short men shorter and fat men...
View ArticleFourth Estate skulduggery
Tim Waterstone is the man who set up the bookshop chain in 1982, so you might expect him to have read a few books, and be OK at writing them. In fact, he’s more a businessman than a writer. He began...
View ArticleDon’t police the beach
You might not have been to Freshwater West, on the remote western shores of Pembrokeshire, but you’ve probably seen it before — on the big screen. Because the bay is so untouched by man, it can stand...
View ArticlePost-racial America? Forget it
The United States is almost as segregated under Obama as it was in the time of Martin Luther King As I arrived in New Orleans this summer, there was a juicy racism row blazing across the airwaves and...
View ArticleLeft out
New Labour Islington is no more – it is now an area for Tory-voting bankers When I grew up in Islington in the 1980s and 90s, there was a reliable election ritual: the bigger the Georgian villa, the...
View ArticlePiling Pelion on Ossa
Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven curls and smoky-voiced seduction, as she takes telly viewers through the greatest hits of the olden days; recent...
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Turkish time travel
Harry Mount looks across the Dardanelles and sees yesterday’s weather today In Canakkale — the biggest town on the Dardanelles, where more than 130,000 British, Australians, New Zealanders and Turks...
View ArticleLatin quarter
When the Romans pulled off their first conquest outside Italy in the second century bc, they weren’t too imaginative. Although the territory was officially named Gallia Narbonensis, they simply called...
View ArticleSpeak to me
Critics have been predicting the death of the public lecture ever since Johannes Gutenberg got his printing press going in 1450. Why bother negotiating the market-day crowds in downtown Mainz to hear...
View ArticleMayfair calling
No, I don’t own Mount Street, despite the name. The Duke of Westminster does, as part of his 100 acres in Mayfair; the street gets its name from Oliver’s Mount, an earthwork in London’s 1640s Civil War...
View ArticleRoyal treasures
Some schoolboys used to know about Alexander the Great (356–323BC), how he extended the Macedonian Empire from Greece to India, cut the Gordian knot, and wept when there were no more worlds to conquer....
View ArticleEngland, their England
Ian Fleming understood the attractions of an English summer. At the end of Dr No, James Bond is in Jamaica, his arch enemy dead, his knockout girlfriend, Honey Rider, about to leap into their double...
View ArticleSt Oscar of Oxford
It was in his room in Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1875 that Oscar Wilde said, ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’ Now, more than 130 years after he left Magdalen, with...
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