Inigo Thomas

Following last week’s floods in the city and province of Valencia in eastern Spain, a spectacular blame game began between the authorities in Madrid and the regional government of Valencia. It had to be someone else’s fault that the southern suburbs of Valencia flooded so badly.

The dining table at the Spanish embassy in Belgrave Square is 13.5 metres long and seats fifty people. It’s said to be the largest table (without leaves) in London. No. 24 Belgrave Square, once Downshire House, was acquired by the Spanish government in 1928. The table came with the house. The previous owner was William Pirrie, the 1st Viscount Pirrie, chairman of the shipbuilders Harland & Wolff and a one-time mayor of Belfast. It was in the dining-room of Downshire House in 1907 that Pirrie and Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, conceived their idea for three vast new ocean liners, the Olympic, the Britannic and the Titanic.

Old Man Texas was a character invented by the Dallas Morning News cartoonist John Knott in 1906. He looked like a cowboy, a figure out of the Old West. He wore a ten-gallon hat over thick, flowing hair. He had a windswept moustache and wore leather boots. Knott was an Austrian who had arrived in Dallas via Sioux City.

In the last week of October the digital dimension of the entire British Library vanished. Just like that. No catalogue, no internet, no way to buy a pencil at the gift shop by card. An early tweet reported ‘technical issues’; a few days later the library said it had been subject to a cyber attack.

The Spectator’s summer party was held this year on 7 July, on the evening of the day that had begun with Boris Johnson’s resignation.

I first met Joan Didion in the summer of 1993, soon after I moved to New York, at the launch party for Christopher Hitchens’s book For the Sake of Argument. I was mesmerised by the hand with which she held her glass – her long, thin fingers. Those hands are on show in the recent Netflix documentary about Didion made by her nephew, Griffin Dunne: she waves her arms and hands in front of the camera as if casting a spell. I’d recently been to Miami and had read her book about the city. As she saw it, Miami was ‘long on rumour, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogotá and to Paris and Madrid’. Much of Miami is about the Cuban exile scene, where a love of guns, violence and conspiracy prefigures the paramilitary supporters of Donald Trump. ‘As in other parts of the world where citizens shop for guerrilla discounts and bargains in automatic weapons, there was in Miami an advanced interest in personal security.’ A single word, ‘advanced’, turns a flat sentence into something else.

With so few people on the streets, your eyes are drawn upwards. I’ve walked or cycled down Rupert Street countless times but have never before noticed the Exchange and Bullion Office at No. 9. The Survey of London says they were the offices of Benjamin Smart, a gold dealer in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

In 1893, the London Daily News published an article about Notting Dale, an area in north Kensington also known as the Potteries for its brick-making kilns and clay pits. ‘A West End Avernus’ was the headline: poor, overcrowded, with shocking housing – if there was an entrance to the Underworld, then this, the article said, was it. A grotesque report inspired by the piece a couple of years later blamed the bad condition of the area on the ‘vicious proclivities of the people themselves’. They were, the report said, ‘loafers, cab-runners, beggars, tramps, thieves and prostitutes’. One of the clay pits made by the 19th-century brick makers was so large that it was called the ‘Ocean’: it was filled with slime. The houses nearby were said to be of ‘a wretched class, many being mere hovels in a ruinous condition, filthy in the extreme, and containing vast accumulations of garbage and offal’. The wells were contaminated. The risk of cholera was high.

Ann Coulter has been Donald Trump’s outspoken champion since he launched his campaign. In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, her book that came out last summer, was more of a manifesto than anything Trump has written himself (that said, I’m not sure he’s ever written anything himself). ‘The only guy whose personal life sounds fascinating is Trump and he never discusses it,’ she wrote. ‘He was too busy talking about building a wall, renegotiating bad trade deals and ending our insane Muslim immigration policies.’ She said yesterday that the cost of building the wall along the US-Mexican border would be ‘roughly equal to one year's worth of therapy, hospital costs of little girls raped by illegal immigrants’. She is a monster.

‘First we are going to cut it off, and then we are going to kill it.’ That was how Colin Powell described the battle plan he and his generals came up with for the war they were about to wage against Saddam Hussein’s army in 1991, and that is, more or less, what happened. ​ After the US A-10 tank-buster bombers known as Warthogs had finished off the Iraqi armoured brigades on the Basra Road, Harold Pinter, disgusted by the gratuitous carnage, wrote a poem called ‘American Football’. He sent it to several publications, including the London Review of Books, where I then worked. He had it faxed to the paper's office on Tavistock Square. None of the editors much liked the poem, but because it was by Pinter there was some further deliberation, and as the afternoon ended we thought we'd defer the decision to the following morning.