Dinner parties
The skull beneath the skin: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, reviewed
Pain lurks below the surface of these sardonic short stories. Happiness is fleeting, and ‘we carry death within us like a stone within a fruit’, one narrator observes
The horrors of dining with a Roman emperor
Elagabalus’s suffocating party tricks may have been exaggerated, but Domitian’s sinister, death-themed feasts could be seen as a dictator’s flamboyant threat
Dear Mary: How can I deal with overly demonstrative colleagues?
Q. A friend constantly walks around with his bootlaces undone. His wife declines to nag him on the grounds she…
Dear Mary
How do you persuade your pleasant dinner guests to go home when they will stay into the early hours if…
Dear Mary
Q. What should a host do when a guest says something so embarrassing in front of the assembled company that…
Dear Mary: How can we make our dinner guests go?
Q. Many of our best and oldest friends have done so well they have stopped work. Meanwhile my husband still…
Your problems solved
Q. I socialise in Shropshire every weekend and regularly give dinners which end at 2 a.m., but it’s a different matter…
Dear Mary
Q. When sending wedding invitations, does one put the full titles on the card, or can one just put, for…
Your problems solved
Q. I’m a single bloke now and for various reasons don’t foresee any change to that status. I have moved…
Your problems solved
Q. A wonderful and generous woman invites me, on a regular basis, to dinner parties at her house. What is…
When did we become a nation of narks?
There’s a danger that in what follows your columnist may seem to be recommending an attitude. Please don’t think that.…
Dear Mary
Q. What is the correct thing to say to a writer friend whose book you haven’t read? I buy most…
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Q. I am organising my 21st birthday party at our family house in Italy. It is a fantastic location, but…
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Q. A friend regularly hires a stall at a general neighbourhood market in order to sell surplus second-hand clothes and…
Dear Mary
Q. My dear English husband has never mastered the knack of timing his interventions in conversation. He hesitates politely, and…
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Q. Some years ago, on holiday in Egypt, we found ourselves in the company of a couple who wanted to…
