The Queen’s English could soon be a thing of the past. I hear the Queen’s English Society is considering taking the unprecedented step of dropping the royal connection from its name. The charity, which exists to promote the correct use of English and strives ‘to halt the decline in standards in its use’, is worried … Read more
I can reveal that the eminent actor, now 81, who achieved worldwide acclaim when he starred as Gandalf in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, has spurned a peerage His triumphs on stage and screen have helped him amass a fortune of nearly £40 million – which would have been beyond the dreams of avarice … Read more
His verse evokes the sweat and suffering of Tommy Atkins — the ordinary soldier who risks his neck in battle only to be consigned to oblivion in peacetime. But that has not prevented Rudyard Kipling’s celebrated poem Mandalay from being expunged from the BBC’s showpiece commemorating the 75th anniversary of VJ Day — much to … Read more
Boris Johnson‘s summer holiday plans have caused hilarity among his friends and former lovers. The Prime Minister and his fiancee, Carrie Symonds, are taking their three-month-old son, Wilfred, on a camping holiday to Scotland. But Petronella Wyatt, who had a four-year affair with Boris, has voiced her scepticism publicly. ‘Boris and Carrie are going to … Read more
He has a peerage to his name and lives in splendour in a £5million house in Hampstead, the leafy enclave favoured by the north London intelligentsia. But broadcasting and literary grandee Melvyn Bragg has never forgotten, still less attempted to disguise, his earliest years in Wigton, Cumbria, when he and his parents lived in a … Read more
The Queen has spent the past three months socially isolating at Windsor Castle amid the coronovirus pandemic but it has not been all doom and gloom. Just two weeks after she attended the nuptials of her granddaughter Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi at Royal Lodge, yesterday she was present at another moving family engagement. … Read more
Numbering the Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince of Wales and Zara and Peter Phillips among its alumni, £41,250-a-year Gordonstoun can lay claim to more royal connections than any other public school of the modern era. But that has not insulated it from complaints by former pupils who are ‘horrified’ and ‘staggered’ by its plans to … Read more
As the mother of the most famous young model in the world, she has been content to remain in the shadows. But no longer: at the age of 61, Pandora Delevingne has begun a new chapter in her life which, though one of privilege, has been disfigured by addiction and depression. She has, I can … Read more
What ARE they teaching British kids these days? Over three-quarters of 16 to 24-year-olds don’t know the county where Shakespeare was born and can’t locate the Angel of the North sculpture Survey concludes that the UK’s Generation Z needs to reconnect with its nation It found that they didn’t know the answers to basic geography … Read more
She likes to celebrate the publication of each of her books with ‘a cold glass of champagne —with lots of bubbles’. But best-selling novelist Victoria Hislop may feel in the mood for a bottle of retsina this morning — if not a magnum. For I can disclose that she has just been awarded honorary Greek … Read more