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John SturgisThe Spectator |
Hever Castle was the childhood home of Anne Boleyn and played a not insignificant part in the Henry VIII story. The smitten despot, already planning...
On Sunday, I was in deepest Wales, listening to birdsong, braying donkeys and a demented cockerel, but instead of getting away from it all I was...
Were The Duke and Duchess of Sussex to leave their mansion in Montecito, California, and head a couple of miles across town, to Toro Canyon, they...
When Sven-Göran Eriksson’s coffin was being paraded through the streets of his home town, ahead of his funeral, it was followed by a marching jazz...
My wife had already been given morphine and they had just topped her up with ketamine. She was now so high she didn’t seem even to know where she...
It is hard to think of anyone in aviation history who has done more to degrade the passenger experience of air travel than the man who has run Ryanair...
On the evening of 10 August 1996, I found myself lost in the grounds of a stately home in Hertfordshire, and very, very drunk. Everywhere I turned,...
The former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson died today. He had terminal cancer and said he expected to be dead before the year was out. In...
It’s become a regular occurrence: a friend or a friend-of-a-friend is visiting London, wants to go to a football game and messages asking for help...
We had steered our narrowboat into the lock at Swineford on the navigable section of the Bristol Avon before 8 a.m., heading upstream, back towards...
I have been fond of vests ever since those plain white cotton ones we wore for primary school athletics in the long ago and mythically hot summers of...
Many previous football tournaments have had a signature motif: the Mexican wave in 1986, the irritating vuvuzelas in South Africa 2010, the firework...
Stuttering England aside, it’s been a great Euros so far: the comedy of Scotland, the tragedy of Croatia, the miracle of Georgia. Now that the...
I live north of the river in London and my parents live south of it, in the Tunbridge Wells. I have long been a registered user of the Dartford...
Perhaps Gareth Southgate’s greatest achievement at the England helm has been to inculcate a sense of togetherness in his squads. This had been...
I first heard it in the spring of 1999 from a bloke who was sitting behind me at a West Ham game. It concerned David Beckham and Victoria Adams of...
I’ve been reading newspapers since I was a teenager and have become strangely familiar with those who write about their lives, even though I’ve...
It was 10.45pm and our film had just finished. I checked my phone and saw a friend claiming he had just seen the northern lights — in Wembley. It...
It was the most dramatic moment of the whole football season. Having trailed 3-0 to the millionaires of Manchester United in their FA Cup semi-final,...
It began, as these things often do, in the Births, Deaths and Marriages column of the Times. ‘On 29th February, to Olivia von Wulffen and Rupert...
In its primary Sunday morning slot, Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 finishes at noon. This is the cue for radio cognoscenti to turn the digital...
Desert Island Discs is 80 years old and to celebrate this milestone the BBC has planned an event unprecedented in the show’s long history. It is...
I was still thinking about the film when I came out of the cinema and got into my car. I can’t have exceeded 28mph. On this wide, well-lit, almost...
It was standing completely still, about 40 yards away, partially obscured by a clump of hazel: a pure white deer. It looked almost iridescent in the...
Most England managers lose their jobs over bad results: Roy Hodgson was sacked after being humiliated by Iceland, Graham Taylor for losing a must-win...
The former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson has terminal cancer, he says he expects to be dead before the year is out. In an age when such...
It’s just a moderately sized town in Kent, but Tunbridge Wells seems to have a literary status disproportionate to its size. And, perhaps as a...
Shropshire was named this week as an unlikely entrant in the top ten global dream travel destinations for 2024 – alongside more predictable...
She was an unlikely contender for fame from the outset, with a pub singer voice and a nose so prominent she would later have it surgically...
Elizabeth David was a cookery writer who led the British palate away from the grim days of stodgy, post-war rationing towards the adoption of a...
Shane MacGowan spent much of his life in pubs, working in them, drinking in them, performing in them – even living in a couple. He would have...
He had mutton chop sideburns, a vast quiff and was dressed in black leather, even down to murderers’ gloves, over which he wore enormous silver...