Diary

I have just come back from spending some days with David Hockney at his house in Normandy. We are making a film about him – the longest film about a single subject I have ever attempted. Like Monet’s, Hockney’s environment is his subject. The great sequence of ‘The Four Seasons’ is from his grounds. He

The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside of, ‘under its roof’. Last week I lived under the roof of hope as the campaigns for the first round of the Turkish presidential elections drew to a close. This is an existential crossroads for

What an emotional wringer the royal family has put us through in the past two years, from the sadness of Prince Philip’s death to the joyful Platinum Jubilee, then Queen Elizabeth II’s own extraordinarily moving funeral, and now the coronation of her son. I’ve felt so privileged to have been at Buckingham Palace for the

Once, years ago, making small talk with Elizabeth II, I asked her if it was true that many peers attending her coronation in 1953 had taken sandwiches into Westminster Abbey hidden inside their coronets. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘They were in the abbey for something like six hours, you know. The Archbishop of Canterbury even

Browsing my local Oxfam, my eye was drawn to a faded hardcover with the title The Merry Wives of Westminster. As some readers may know, my Twitter handle is @WestminsterWAG, so I bought it for the princely sum of £2.99. It wasn’t until I got home and started reading it that I realised who the

You can’t please all of the people any of the time. But a core part of my job is ensuring that I don’t consistently displease a majority of them. Last week a radio show had a phone-in asking listeners to debate whether I’m a racist. I thought about calling in as Margaret from Fareham, to suggest

Years ago, as a penniless young musician, I sometimes played the organ at weddings and learned a bitter lesson: the congregation hadn’t come for the music. I was used to concert audiences who listened attentively and rewarded pleasure received with appreciation given, and it came as a shock to discover that wedding congregations chattered or

Two attacks in local villages, leaving 17 dead in one and eight in another, says my teacher friend from Kaduna State in Nigeria in one of his latest letters. He writes regularly about the threats that he and his family and students face from Islamist militias. But what stays in my mind, apart from the

Last Friday I found myself in the magnificent Carnegie-funded Central Library in George IV Bridge, Edinburgh. I was due to speak at a Scotonomics conference and, after glancing at some of the more challenging questions that had been sent in advance, concluded that an hour or so’s revision was urgently called for on the respective

This has been an agonising time for those of us who love Julian Sands. On 13 January, he went for a one-day hike up Mount Baldy, 50 miles from Los Angeles, and hasn’t been seen since. No one who knows Julian can believe he’s dead. He’s the very epitome of the free-spirited actor. You never

Washington, DC You can measure the health of the American republic, or at least its governing institutions, on a weekday-morning Acela train from Washington to New York. It’s too expensive to use for pleasure ($337 if you plan late and are unlucky), too time-consuming (almost three hours for the 225-mile trip) to permit idling in

I’m in New Zealand, climax to my antipodean speaking tour, where I walked headlong into a raging controversy. Jacinda Ardern’s government implemented a ludicrous policy, spawned by Chris Hipkins’s Ministry of Education before he became prime minister. Science classes are to be taught that Māori ‘Ways of Knowing’ (Mātauranga Māori) have equal standing with ‘western’

This is National Vandalism Week, and I have been celebrating it in style. First stop – the London Coliseum for the opening night of English National Opera’s inspiring new production of The Rhinegold. The Arts Council says that the ENO is ‘one of the most dynamic and imaginative organisations working in the country’. One can believe

Early last week I bought myself a teapot. I have several, but I could not resist this with its turquoise Mediterranean charm. Alongside I purchased tea glasses — not mugs or cups, but glasses. The Turkish way. It comes with a milk jug. The English way. Excited to use them for the first time early

At the start of last year, the Leopard Inn in Burslem, the scene of the celebrated meeting between potter Josiah Wedgwood and engineer James Brindley to agree the navigation of the Trent and Mersey Canal, ‘went on fire’. Close by, the Wedgwood Institute, founded by William Gladstone in 1863 as a design school, and proudly

‘The end of the novel’: so ran a headline in the Times recently. Well, every few years one pundit or another predicts the death of the novel. They have done so throughout my lifetime and by now many of them may well be deceased themselves. But this article cogently pointed out the dangers of the

Last Sunday in LA, we went to the cinema, where I’ve hardly been since Covid. I wasn’t expecting much from the film, as truly enjoyable and entertaining films have been thin on the ground recently. Regardless, I’ve always loved the whole experience of cinema-going, from handing over the tickets and finding your seat to the

All is grist that comes to a columnist’s mill. The late Alan Coren once wrote that if he heard a screech of tyres in the road outside his house, he rushed out, notebook in hand, ‘because you never know where the next 300 words are coming from’. I find that the Anniversary Almanac can be

In Los Angeles this week, much of the talk was about the weather. Sunny California was copping a bomb cyclone of rain and snow, with the Sussexes’ home in Montecito in the path of the wild weather, though any witty meteorological metaphors fall flat in the face of such very real damage and suffering. One