The Kiss-Off
As the British press draw themselves bloated and bloody-faced from their feeding frenzy on the slaughtered marriage of the "domestic goddess" Nigella Lawson to advertising titan Charles Saatchi, I was struck by how this duel in ...
When the Fiske half of my family immigrated to England, we weren"t exactly popular. We arrived at the coast in boats and disgorged en masse only to be met "with spear tips and sword blades," according to the contemporary account. Things were different in those days. Luckily we were better armed and better trained than the defending ...
As the British press draw themselves bloated and bloody-faced from their feeding frenzy on the slaughtered marriage of the "domestic goddess" Nigella Lawson to advertising titan Charles Saatchi, I was struck by how this duel in ...
Driving around Spain, one notices all the castles. That’s quite a thing to notice for an Englishman such as myself, as we have thousands of them. But on Spain's freeways they seem to spring up on the horizon with hourly regularity ...
In 2009 I first came to Pamplona to run with the bulls. I was terrified in that complete and overwhelming way that total ignorance brings, standing on a street corner and waiting for death to come. I comported myself honorably but not ...
My friend Hugh Dancy came to London this week while on a break before filming a series about that least friendly of fictional characters, Thomas Harris’s serial killer Hannibal Lecter. One of Harris's characters calls Lecter ...
Last week I drove from Seville to Ronda, its great rival for primacy in the bullfighting world. Accompanying me was the noted son of that town, Cayetano Rivera Ordóñez. Cayetano, a former matador, has retired from bullfighting to ...
Last week I gave a talk on my pet topic of bullfighting in front of various politicos from Spain and Britain at the Reform Club in London, which was founded in 1836 in the wake of the Great Reform Act of "32 that was the first step ...
Returning to London from Seville I see that abortion is once again one of the top news stories in what the Spanish still refer to as the Anglo-Saxon world: in the US, Ireland, and even Australia. Here in Britain we seem to be much more ...
Last night while seated in the La Maestranza bullring of Seville to watch the great matador José Marà Manzanares dance with and dispatch six bulls, I was reminded why I became so fascinated by the spectacle we Anglo-Saxons ...
The incident reads like a sick contemporary rewrite of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. A fourteen-year-old girl sat down to eat a meat pie in the kitchen of a friend's house where she was staying. The house was empty at the time except for ...