Society

From Andrew Roberts Q. My wife and I are addicted to the brilliant TV series Gogglebox, which makes us feel proud to be British. We know two of the people who appear on it socially and might be meeting them in the new year. How can we show our appreciation of their superb, hilarious and insightful contributions without seeming sycophantic or embarrassingly adulatory? A. No need to worry as one of the couple is so reclusive you are unlikely to encounter him outside the television screen. The other would be able to offset any sycophancy with her memory of the verbal abuse she once received when tactlessly bursting into your

My mother is a good woman. But on being greeted by a charming golden retriever, a shaking red bucket and the dog’s well-meaning human handler from a local animal charity, a line had been crossed, even for her. Having already put her hand in her pocket for multiple charities in the town centre while Christmas shopping – from the wonderful Salvation Army brass band playing Away in a manger and the granddaughter she sent forth with a few quid, to the ebullient veteran who offered to pack her bags at M&S for a military charity – as a pensioner with no private income, she felt there was nothing more she could

Skiing as a pastime is now more accessible than ever but for those seeking a home in the Alps, particularly in Switzerland, the market is far from all-inclusive. Recent rules and regulations setting out who can buy what, and where, means it pays to do your research. In the 12 years I’ve worked in Knight Frank’s international research team one of the biggest challenges has been keeping abreast of the new policies, taxes, and referenda that buffet the housing markets in the 55-plus countries that we monitor. Nowhere is this more challenging than in Switzerland. The Swiss, it would seem, love a referendum. In 2012 Switzerland passed a new law

In the early 1990s, after the shock of the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I began to do some research among those who condemned him, and learned that a strange thing was happening among young British Muslim men and women. I first wrote about this strange thing in my novel The Black Album, which concerns a young man who comes to London from the provinces to study and finds himself caught between the sex-and-ecstasy-stimulated hedonism of the late 1980s and the nascent fundamentalist movement. At the end of the novel the Asian kids — as they were called then — burn The Satanic Verses and attack a bookshop. I followed