Month: November 2006

Hedge Hogging
Barton Biggs
Constable and Robinson

To the non-specialist man or woman, few books about wine are readable – we want to drink the stuff, not read about it. We particularly do not want to be swamped by the minutiae of grape-growing and wine-blending.

Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, which took place on Monday, November 28th, 1966, was an event without peer in the annals of New York society. The masked ball hosted by the William K. Vanderbilts in 1883 runs at a close second, but Capote’s masked ball had the added element of being a modern media phenomenon directed by a man who was himself a modern media phenomenon.

Biographer Tom Bower has already been slandered by his latest subject, Conrad Black. Is he bothered? Is he hell, says Christopher Silvester

‘Women: know your limits’ was Harry Enfield’s marvellous spoof 1950s public information film in his 1990s TV series. It told women how to behave: a 1950s upper middle-class dinner party, rendered in crackly black and white, has four couples in evening clothes sat round a mahogany table, the men bantering with each other, the women smiling sweetly.