Shortly before his death, David Frost rang to ask me to take part in a radio series he was making to mark the 50th anniversary of ‘the year, Chris, that I know is closest to your heart, 1963’. This was not because 1963 was the year when he and I worked together on the BBC
The single most common reaction I get from Americans when they learn that we’re placing our newspapers under our politicians is: ‘Y’all need a Bill of Rights’. You can see their point. Absolute freedom of expression used to distinguish the English-speaking peoples from the run of nations. The restrictions which even other western democracies applied
This week the General Synod edged one step closer towards permitting the ordination of female bishops. The final outcome is likely to be some kind of compromise to appease traditionalists similar to that in 1992 when the ordination of female priests was passed. But unlike that occasion, one crucial voice will not be heard nor
Coming next month to a courtroom near you: a bewildered young man, freshly convicted, trembles in the dock while awaiting his fate. But just before sentencing, a weeping widow stands, turns welling blue eyes to the bench and beseeches His Honour: ‘I cannot forgive him for his part in my husband’s death. My life is
BASF, the world’s largest chemical company, has been headquartered in Germany since before the country formally existed. Founded in 1865 by the industrial pioneer Friedrich Engelhorn, it still occupies the vast site on the banks of the Rhine at Ludwigshafen where its first dye and soda factories were built. A third of its staff are
‘Buy on the bullets’ is the cry of the most ruthless stockbrokers — invest just before a war, after the stock markets dive, before the recovery kicks in. In the same way, now is the time for us heartless continental drivers to head for poor, battered Greece. Maybe it’s not quite war-torn yet, but driving
It takes a lot to make the subject of immigration respectable for liberals, at least if you’re pointing out its problematic aspects. But Paul Collier, an Oxford economist specialising in the world’s bottom billion, has, in the 270-odd pages of his new book Exodus, opened up the issue for the left — well, for all
‘On the shore of desolate waves / he stood, full of lofty thoughts / and gazed afar.’ So begins Pushkin’s epic poem ‘The Bronze Horseman’, with the legend of Peter the Great founding his new city in 1703. A remote and inhospitable swampland in north-western Russia was transformed into his ‘window on the West’, a Baroque and neo-classical masterpiece.
‘You were at the Fish, I hear,’ a Berlin friend told me. ‘I didn’t know you were an old hippie.’ Reputations can cling to places as they do to people. Zwiebelfisch, the Berlin inn he was referring to, has not been a haunt of hippies — radicals, more like, ‘the class of ’68’ — for
George Galloway is unhappy. One of his interlocutors on Twitter has told him to ‘Fuck off back to England’. Gorgeous George is in Glasgow for the first in a series of roadshows in which he sets out his case for Scotland remaining part of the Union and he’s not going anywhere. Not today, not tomorrow,
Autumn in Paris has been immortalised in one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most poignant poems. Having left his wife in Berlin, Rilke moved to Paris in 1902 where he wrote ‘Herbsttag’ (Autumn Day). ‘Whoever is alone now, will remain so for long. He will stay up late, write long letters and wander restlessly in the
‘I remember you from last time,’ said the young man on the promenade. It was my first night back in Tangier. I was alone and tired and lonely. I liked the idea of meeting someone who knew me, if only from a brief encounter a few years before. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, though I
Venice is a 10,000-carat jewel set by the greatest ever goldsmith pinned to the breast of the most beautiful woman to have lived. Built out of a need for security in the turbulent world of late antiquity, it was protected by the lagoon, which also gave it political stability, and with political stability came riches,
Deep below West 52nd Street is a massive stash of booze. The cops never found it during Prohibition, and it belongs to the 21 Club. Famous for its sumptuously New Yorky dishes (like filet mignon with kumquat vinaigrette), 21 is a real boys’ den. Dark and plush, the subterranean rooms are festooned with intriguing junk:
Family legend has it that when I arrived in Durham, a fresh-faced ingénue from deepest Somerset, I called home. ‘This is the life,’ I said, after a bare 24 hours in the frozen north, and they hardly heard from me again. I would have expected my first daughter to have a similar experience, but by
Don’t delay — this is the year to visit the National Arboretum. Thanks to the long hours of sunlight we had this summer, followed by the cooler and shorter days of recent weeks, this autumn is going to be one to remember. Fruit, hops, hips and nuts hang heavy on the bough, but there is
Twenty-one years ago this week a sitcom arrived on British television involving three characters so improbable that they held the nation in thrall. It had started as a French and Saunders comedy sketch about a hedonistic ‘modern’ mother (Eddy) and her appalled, straight-laced daughter (Saffy). To spin this out into a series, Jennifer Saunders added
Firoozeh Bazrafkan is frightened of nothing. Five foot tall, 31 years old, and so thin you think a puff of wind could blow her away, she still has the courage to be a truly radical artist and challenge those who might hurt her. She fights for women’s rights and intellectual freedom, and her background means
From repentance to restitution, Germany has done an exemplary job of facing up to its Nazi past — with a little help, it might waspishly be said, from the victorious Allies. Every aspect of life, from education and philosophy, to science, politics, music and the law, was held up to the light early on and
Cairo Hook nose, blue chin, Arab headdress: the tomb robber resembled a villain from a Tintin comic. His friend was packing a big pistol and behind them it was sunset over the pyramids at Dahshur, south of Cairo. Looting’s been rife in Egypt since antiquity — but there has been an alarming acceleration since the