Susie Boyt

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

How to be sane about Christmas? Search me. I still believe total capitulation is the best approach. After the balm Christmas brought me in childhood when its annual flashes of joy made me an optimist, I will always love it and tend to it assiduously. The stockings I pack are pairs of tights. (Double the gifts.) There are permanent marks on the ceiling from the trees. In my mind Christmas has long been twinned with havoc but not a bad variety: it is a bracing mayhem, a kind of electric stage fri…

One of the best feelings in the world is waking on a Sunday morning, a little the worse for wear after a party, and waiting for the reviews to come in. If you are in the business of creating memorable events, as all party-givers are to a certain extent, then the joy that accompanies notes that begin “Superlatives fail me” and “Like some invincible Olympians (of hospitality) you . . . ” and “When I was a kid growing up in Wales I dreamed that the parties in London would be like this” is hard to b…

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Charlie Chaplin, by Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, RRP£14.99, 272 pages

The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert, Bloomsbury, RRP£18.99/Viking, RRP$28.95, 512 pages

Last night I was surprised to see Haddock Monte Carlo staring out at me from a Piccadilly menu. I am told it is a traditional dish in which haddock is introduced to spinach and poached egg and a white wine sauce but it looks all wrong on the page. Haddock has no business being in Monte Carlo. It is a soothing homely creature; a cousin, after all, of the humble cod. A cod in the playground of the rich and famous? In a tax haven where the yachts are the size of mansions and the railway station res…

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Sprinting down the Strand, 10 minutes late to meet Mickey Rooney at his hotel, I realised what I really wanted to find out was this: is it possible with humour and good grace to be someone who used to be the most famous person in the world? For in 1938 that was Mickey Rooney’s privilege. For the following three years he was the number one grossing actor at the box office, beating Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy to the title. In 1940, 55 per cent of MGM’s income came from the Andy Hardy series of…