It’s dangerous, in my line of work, to promise you’ll be anywhere by 8 p.m. I made this mistake recently, saying I’d turn up to a dinner after a Budget discussion — a ‘quad’ meeting, where I sit with the Prime Minister, George Osborne and Nick Clegg. We’ve been doing this for five years, so
This last week, in India, I visited six cities in seven days: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta and New Delhi. This is my 11th trip to India and from the very beginning the signs were good. For a start, the temperature on arrival in Mumbai was a cool 22 degrees and I was told it had
Last week I went to the exhilarating English National Opera production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers — five hours of wonderful music and singing whizzed by without a moment’s boredom. But there was one odd and perturbing factor, I thought. In place of a curtain, there was a huge ‘frontcloth’. It was covered with a collage
It’ll be a Skype interview, says the producer from Greek television, and not live. In TV-speak that usually means not urgent and not important, but I’ve become vaguely interesting to Greeks because of the ‘Moscovici draft’ — a doomed attempt to resolve the crisis, leaked to me amid denials of its existence. The interview goes
All this fuss about Fifty Shades of Grey! I wonder how many people have actually read all three books? Sado-masochism is only half the story. When you’ve waded through the entire oeuvre, if such appalling writing can be dignified with that term, you discover that the whole story is one of redemption. The ostensibly wicked,
Just back from Sri Lanka, a place I first went to in 1981. It was then a dreamy island. I remember giving the room boy who had brought my case to the bandicoot-infested bedroom in Colombo a few rupees, but he wasn’t interested. He just wanted to sit on the bed and talk — about
An excellent test of character is a person’s response to being offered an Oldie of the Year Award. There have always been those to whom the word ‘oldie’ is in itself an embarrassment. When Richard Ingrams founded the Oldie magazine in 1992, he was warned by many that it would fail because of its name.
Dry January is tougher than it sounds. Well, for me anyway. It’s now been some 28 days since I’ve had a drink, and you should see what that means for my campaigning strategy. ‘Ginger beer? Lemonade?’ Pub-goers around the country can’t believe it when I walk in and whisper my order over the bar. The
As weather bombs brew in the north Atlantic, I’m roughing it by heading off to Rajasthan, and the literary festival where you are most likely to be greeted by an elephant. The life of a writer is rarely glamorous, but for one week in January — should an invitation to Jaipur be forthcoming — it
Moscow Here we go again. The rouble slides, then tumbles, and slides again. For those of us who remember the crash of August 1998, the drill is familiar. For Muscovites, the old instincts have surfaced from the 1990s like a sausagey burp. Shoppers besieged Ikea, Auchan and other mega-markets, desperate to spend rapidly devaluing roubles.
I was once bundled into a police car in Palm Springs to explain why I didn’t have snow-tyres on my pick-up in the red-hot California desert. I don’t remember the outcome of the ‘arraignment’, but will never forget the lady cop’s name, L. Nevada Yonkers. Other weird names have stuck with me. Reading The Most
An embarrassing confession: in the late 1960s, I was a Trotskyite. But that period of political adolescence has its uses. It made me aware of the methods employed by extremist parties such as the Scots Nats. Trots wanted to encourage ‘the workers’ to make impossible demands, including ludicrously high wage rates, in order to bring
Every year Christmas comes earlier and earlier in America. Cards, baubles and imitation trees were being sold in the big department stores in August, and the street decorations have been up in Beverly Hills since well before Halloween. From late October onwards, it’s the season of dressing up and showing off in downtown LA. Street
Soon after I joined the Sun as managing editor (among other things, I used to review novels for The Spectator), I read an interview with Keir Starmer, the outgoing head of the Crown Prosecution Service. What an unhealthy thing it would be, he said, if journalists had to consult with lawyers every time they pursued
The most unfashionable show on television, Songs of Praise, has had a makeover. The BBC had apparently discovered that the average viewer of the show was in their mid-seventies. Quelle surprise: in the trade it is known as ‘The Resurrection Show’, because so many participants shuffle off their mortal coil before transmission. The new version
Oh God, it’s happened again. Another evening where I’m surrounded by people I know personally or have interviewed, and I can’t remember a single name. Multiple blanks. It’s a sort of self-fulfilling nervous tic — a phobia, almost. We were at a fundraiser at our kids’ former school in north London. For some reason, lots
Two million pounds can buy you consideration for a place on a medical trial! Every year untold numbers of potential cancer therapies are abandoned. There is simply not enough money to test all the promising drugs and interventions. To my astonishment, I’ve had an idea about how to curb this appalling waste. I am not
Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just like an ordinary piece of fish — a bit small, as is usual in pretentious restaurants — on a plate sprinkled and drizzled as though the chef had perhaps coughed over it rather violently or
To the British embassy in Paris for a colloquium on ‘Napoleon and Wellington in War and Peace’ organised by our ambassador, Sir Peter Ricketts, to mark the bicentenary of the purchase of the embassy from Pauline Borghese, Napoleon’s sister. (According to the historian of the house, Tim Knox, Pauline would warm her feet on the
In order to promote the Dylan Thomas in Fitzrovia festival, I am trying to persuade Jason Morell, the director, that he must help me come up with stunts. ‘It’s stunts that will get us into the meeja,’ I tell him. So we launch the ‘Dylan Thomas Fitzrovia Breakfast Challenge’. Gary Kemp, Tom Hollander, Owen Teale
