Some of you are going to be appalled that it has taken me till now to read Trollope’s Autobiography. And quite right too. If I’d read it in my mid-twenties instead of my mid-forties, I would have had two dozen novels under my belt by now instead of a measly five-and-a-half. And you would never
The presenter on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme was doing a quick round-up of the weather on a freezing December morning, just before signing off at 9 a.m. Very cold all over Britain, he said. Later there would be ‘snow in the north of the country’. ‘Which country?’ I thought. It was an immediate and
How the pursuit of happiness could lead Britain to the right The political mantra that the Young Turks in the Tory party live by is ‘in opposition you move to the centre, in government you move the centre’. Before the last election, they would use the line — often a bit defensively — to justify
Last year, we stopped sending Christmas cards. We are not sending them this year either. I still feel guilty about it: friends take the trouble to send such nice ones. Part of the problem — as well as laziness — is technology. Emails make one extremely conscious of the number of separate operations required by
From elections to ash clouds, 2010 was a year that taught us to expect the unexpected This was a year of predictable trends and unpredictable events. It was predictable that the UK would limp out of recession behind France, Germany and the US, and a reasonable bet both that we would avoid a double dip
