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Manon Lescaut
Punk band Good Charlotte's hit - Girls Don't Like Boys, Girls like Cars and Money, isn't an operatic aria but it is yet another riff on the old theme of women as gold- diggers and chancers, heart-breakers who are careless with money and fickle in love.
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How To Save Your Pension From the Stock Market
How can you protect your pension investment from current stock market instability, and do some good in the world?
That was the question I asked myself when my pension pot lost 50k and the only comment from Scottish Equitable was that I might like to shift to a less 'green' fund.
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The Letters of Sylvia Beach
'Nine stenographers gave up the typing... and a gentleman from the British Embassy burned a dozen pages in a rage ...Ulysses is a masterpiece and one day will rank among the classics of English literature...Joyce is in Paris and I told him I would publish his book after the publishers in New York threw up the job in a fright.' (1921)
Sylvia Beach's Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company had barely been open two years when she decided to publish Ulysses.
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House Restoration: The Joy of Wrecks
Half a million pounds for a crumbling Cotswold cottage with no roof and only a few walls is a dream come true for some. Sometimes I think I was a Viking in a past life.
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'The Moon was the perfect surface for a rewrite'
In 1955 Walt Disney showed a private screening of his new film Man and the Moon to President Eisenhower and his generals at the Pentagon. Three months later the USA announced that they would be sending a satellite into space.
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Homemade mince pies
As this is going to be a Homemade Christmas we had better start this afternoon. My advice for the weekends leading up to the Great Event is to begin with a stash of audio books to entertain your ears while your hands are nimbly at it with sellotape and scissors, pastry cutters and kegs of mince-meat.
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I've just popped in with my Goblin
I was in the electrical shop in Stow on the Wold when I heard a man behind me say, 'I've just popped in with my Goblin.' I didn't look round because what I wanted to see was a cross creature, three feet tall, chewing the lampshades and pinging the toasters. I know he was really a vacuum cleaner, but it set me thinking about fairy stories, especially as our current global crisis reads like a demented version of The Emperor's New Clothes mated with The Fisherman and the Flounder.
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So you got that by doing writing?
My favourite anecdote of a writer's life - mine - is the one about the old boy who runs the allotments up the road, who took a look at my new Landrover, and shook his head, and said, 'So you got that by doing writing?' Any readers out there inspired by the heady combination of this week's Cheltenham Festival issue, and the chance to buy a Four x Four from the proceeds of their pen, might be interested in the new idea from the Faber publishing house - The Faber Academy.
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Is this how we live, love, and use language now?
Readers of my previous column will know that I managed to boil my mobile phone thanks to an excess of Right Brain activity brought about by immersing myself in writing a book.
Since that unfortunate event, I moved over into Left Brain for long enough to buy a new phone, possibly quite a male phone, if phones play to gender, and I have become fascinated - and horrified - by the Text Templates. Is this how we live, love, and use language now?
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A noticeable difference between left and right brain activity
I am not an absent-minded person, and certainly not like Wittgenstein who had to summon his friends to help him fasten his braces - he couldn't match the loops to his trouser buttons, and if left to dress unaided, went forth into Cambridge in a twisted tweedy mass of clown clothes.
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