By Robert Mendick, chief reporter and Dominic Nicholls 1 OCTOBER 2016 • 10:00PM. This article was published in the Sunday Telegraph on Sunday October 2nd. When Phileas Fogg wagered £20,000 he could circumnavigate the globe in 80 days, he departed from the Reform Club in Pall Mall, London. Had he set off today, Jules Verne’s creation might…
Never mind the passage of time
Tobi Vail, former girlfriend of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain, became a fan of the youth-targeted deodorant Teen Spirit when it was launched in America in 1991. As a joke Katherine Hanna, the lead singer of the band Bikini Kill, which also included Vail, scrawled across a wall in Cobain’s apartment ‘Kurt smells like teen spirit’….
Gene genie
In my opinion the English language is currently diffy two words. First, the fear that having checked into your hotel room you will pull back the shower curtain in the bathroom – extended for hygiene purposes – and discover a dead body in the bath, courtesy of some horrific Coen Brothers-like murder. The second missing…
Missing the (Hinkley) point
“If a country doesn’t produce its own energy it deserves to have the lights turned off and be invaded.” So says the reliably straight-talking David Lenigas, entrepreneur and energy-investor. The green light to build the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset, to be financed by France and China, was a decision based primarily…
Cosy chats and posturing
Could the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have done more to prevent the murders of 30 Britons in Tunisia last year? In June 2015 the Britons and eight other foreign nationals were murdered when Seifeddine Rezgui attacked a beachfront hotel in Sousse, Tunisia. The attack, later claimed by Daesh, came just three months after 22…
Honoured
Edwin Weaver was probably born in 1908; we can’t be sure as it is suspected he falsified his age to enlist in the Royal Artillery in Birmingham in 1925. He volunteered for the SAS in 1943 and, after evacuating escaped POWs along the Italian coast for many months he parachuted into eastern France in August…
addingtonWord 