If you’re going to be working for even just one year or a few months – between casual holidays, world tours, sick leaves, or career retrospectives in which you step back so as to take stock – never mind forty or fifty years waiting painstakingly for retirement, either way you’ll want for the period to be a happy one. But the…
Remarkably, as if there were anything more to say on the subject, the topic of equal prize money when it comes to Grand Slam tennis never strays far from so many spectators’ lips. Whether it’s disgruntled viewers of either gender, or sordid journalists searching for clicks, The Shimmering Ostrich firmly condemns such grotty behaviour, and avows that equal pay should forever persist….
Whether you’re an orange-sucking mafioso or a leopard-print-wearing MP, surely every leader knows the adage about keeping your friends close, but your enemies even closer. Theresa May is no Don but she must at least be dimly aware of the concept, yet perhaps eager to show herself apart from the political game, it is one which she seems resolutely willing…
All your tastes are inconsistent: Your character undergoes no change; You have no control of your inclinations. You take to burning fires Over trifles which are most slight. The attraction of the novel, Inflames you to crazed delight: More than enough to seduce you Is your own childish portrait. Who amuses you controls you: Who made you laugh? They did…
If Atlanticist politicians in the United Kingdom opted to borrow the inaugural ball or correspondents’ dinner from the United States, perhaps on the coronation of Theresa May somebody could have co-opted a Don Rickles joke, witheringly complimenting the departing David Cameron by telling the gathered hangers-on ‘He’s a wonderful guy. You talk to him, it’s like being alone’. The ‘wonderful’ would be…
Emerging from dingy Durham into the multi-coloured, ambi-sextrous world of 1970s pop, as the founder and frontman of Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry found himself immediately thrust into a realm of beautiful women. What must have seemed like never never land viewed from the perspective of the coal mining pits of his youth swiftly became do you want some and more? As…
There are few shows these days which seem to inspire a nation, and none in the United Kingdom nearly as successful as The Great British Bake Off. In 2015, the top five most-watched television broadcasts of the year were all Bake Off episodes, with the season six series finale winning a whopping 15.16 million viewers as Nadiya Hussain’s iced buns brought…
Most Republicans have known for a long time now that there is something terribly wrong with Hillary Clinton, a life-threatening, brain-sapping, skin-eating, otherwise-debilitating embolism, infection, or disease. The complicit liberal press cannot hide it, and it is such that neither the high-tech physician nor blood-sucking leech can cure. She is irreparable and irredeemable. The devil has hold of her, and…
When Liam Fox isn’t masquerading as a charity or holidaying in Sri Lanka with Adam Werritty, his bestest chum, he likes to run his mouth in front of think tanks and lobby groups amenable to his far-right, Atlanticist, military-industrial point of view. There’s money to be had in dodgy defence deals and fake reconstruction projects, not to mention buttressing climate change deniers and…
