Patrick Kidd

You know you’re getting old when French prime ministers look young. Younger even than our teenage darts prodigies.As Gérard Araud, former French ambassador to the United States, remarked, if you add

The mad ambitions of the builders of the seven wonders of the world put us to shame. By Patrick Kidd

Movies to bring about world peace? Forecasters can get it right but are sometimes way off the mark

Berwick Kaler has delighted audiences in York since 1977. He told Patrick Kidd his stage secrets

With a general election on the horizon, Labour will soon be invited to discuss policies with civil servants. This has happened since the war but hasn’t always been appreciated. The Institute for

Despite spending the last 85 years of his life in America, Henry Kissinger always kept his German accent. The Times Diary reported in 1973 that the US secretary of state had opened a talk on

The FA’s first attempt to find a manager to replace Walter Winterbottom attracted 59 replies, a dozen of which were cranks – then Alf Ramsey offered his services

When Prince Edward was trying to make it in light entertainment, his first paid job was as a production assistant with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Company. Returning to the palace after his

The food critic Grace Dent, who has bailed out of I’m a Celebrity before the jellied wombat sphincter course, would prefer to expire on the BBC. “I want to die on MasterChef,” she told the latest

Hanif Kureishi was once named by this paper among the 50 greatest postwar British writers. We were probably not thinking of his pornography. Kureishi writes on

Secret agent of the year was Patricia Owtram, 100, who worked at Bletchley Park despite not being entirely sold by the job advert, which made codebreaking sound like a social event

In the lower reaches of rugby’s pyramid, they come in all shapes, sizes and ages. With Blackheath away last week, I dropped eight divisions to watch Askeans v Beccehamians in Kent Division Five. It

As M in the James Bond films, Dame Judi Dench had a professional relationship with her MI6 subordinates. Off screen, she unwittingly showed Ben Whishaw, who pla

The parliamentary Christmas jumper is back. The new design, costing £49 from the Westminster gift shop, has green, red and black Nutcracker soldiers, representing the Commons, Lords and clerks, amid a Fair Isle pattern

Before donning his ermine to be greeted in the Lords as “right, trusty and well-beloved counsellor (delete as applicable)”, Chipping Norton’s new baron contributed to one of Boris Johnson’s projects. Lord Cameron’s old chum had resurrected the Prime Minister’s Library, a tradition established by Ram

As rugby union gets out the bunting for its first “derby weekend”, in which Premiership teams play their local rivals (a bit of a stretch in the case of Sale v Newcastle, who are 110 miles apart)

The Monty Python musical Spamalot is back on Broadway, which this week reminded Eric Idle, the show’s writer, of when he got his first Tony nomination. It wasn

When Ed Vaizey met Keith Allen recently, the former arts minister needed to ask a question that had nagged him for years. Was Allen’s villainous and rather

Rishi Sunak’s decision to shunt the northern part of the HS2 railway into a long siding means that at last Andrew Percy can go back to thinking in imperial. For

For those who like to do reshuffles at home, The Spectator magazine is selling the perfect Christmas gift: a pack of political playing cards illustrated by Morten Morland.