Books, we are continually told, particularly by people who rarely read them, are going the way of the dodo. The shops that sell them are closing at an alarming rate, as the dreaded Kindle takes over, and public libraries are being encouraged to turn themselves into noisy ‘resource centres’, designed to attract the feckless young.
I caught the figure strolling towards me out the corner of my eye. At first I thought I was mistaken. Then it nearly took my breath away. I was standing in the impressive wooden-beamed assembly hall of Paisley Grammar, where I’d gathered at the start of each school day many years before, silent and smartly
The outcry over Sayeeda Warsi’s speech on Islamophobia last week cannot be understood without a clear grasp of the balance of power within the coalition government. There are two factions, and the strongest can loosely be described as neoconservative. This faction remains an unconditional supporter of the United States of America, continues to defend the
When you have guests over for dinner — Tuscan lamb with truffled polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte tatin — at what time do you raise your hand, or bang a knife upon a glass and say. When you have guests over for dinner — Tuscan lamb with truffled polenta, perhaps, followed by pear tarte
When Poles arrive in Britain, we learn some fascinating things about ourselves. We are, it seems, from a part of the world known as the ‘Eastern bloc’. It is populated by lazy benefits thieves, most of whom want to move to Britain. When the EU flung open Britain’s barriers seven years ago, the stereotype wasn’t
Heinz Wolff’s latest and most ambitious experiment might just solve the problem of care for the elderly Heinz Wolff has been offered Maidenhead by the government as the laboratory for his next and boldest experiment, but it is not enough. ‘They should give me the Isle of Wight,’ he cries, domed cranium pulsing beneath his
Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former dictator of Haiti once known as Baby Doc, returned to his native land last week, looking wide-eyed and frail. He read a statement in which he expressed ‘deep sorrow for all those who say they were victims of my government’ and promised that he hadn’t come home to cause trouble, but
It is easy to tell when David Cameron is wading into trouble during interviews. He becomes defensive, audibly irritated and — as an emergency self-calming measure — tries to force a little laugh. He performed this telltale routine on the radio on Monday, when challenged over his NHS reforms. He had promised the country no
Sangin, Afghanistan ‘You don’t want to end up on a bracelet or on a fucking T-shirt. If you see people that need to die, kill them,’ said the US Marine Corps sergeant, briefing the convoy about to leave. It was night and we were setting off along the main road out of Sangin. Highway 611
A friend of mine has just come back from a few days of Civil Service in-house training. He managed in no time to get the hang of the exercise, namely, the mastery of another language. Not a foreign language, which might have been handy, but not English either. ‘I learnt,’ he said proudly, ‘about “brain-friendly
The New York City neighbourhood where politically correct prejudices are born Most people, when they hear the word Brooklyn, will think of big-bellied pizza-spinners, or men hunched over pints of the black stuff in Little Ireland, or black kids in hanging-down trousers ghetto-limping through the streets. But there’s another side, a whiter, cleaner, more PC
Being married to Rose, one of the greatest cooks in the country, is an especially pleasurable thing. No meal is ever dull. Breakfast can be a variety of treats from toast to scrambled eggs to a fried venison liver. Lunch is usually a sausage, perhaps some lentils or something leftover from the evening before. Dinner
Let no one say this is not a redistributive government. It is taking benefits away from the poor and giving them instead to people with large houses and a bit of spare capital. How? Through a great green energy scam, originally devised by Labour, which could not be better designed to penalise the poor and
The Lib Dems’ troubles are a result not only of coalition and foolish promises, but of a resurgence of the old left-right division In 1935, George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England, one of those rare histories that survive long after the author’s death. The elegance and vigour of his description of Edwardian
Mark Boxer once drew a caricature of his friend John Gross half-buried beneath piles of hardback books while glancing up from a copy of Tatler. It’s a caricature that contains a nugget of truth — it is rare, these days, for anyone so bookish to keep such a close eye on the toings-and-froings of high
Thilo Sarrazin is breaking Germany’s taboos on welfare and immigration – and selling over a million books in the process In Berlin in September, I noticed that Deutschland schafft sich ab (‘The Abolition of Germany’), a taboo-breaking blockbuster by Bundesbank governor Thilo Sarrazin, had just come through a new printing after having been sold out
I was cured of a lifelong stammer by a technique even Lionel Logue, George VI’s celebrated speech therapist, never tried. The cure lasted exactly three minutes, and has never been repeated. In the mid-1990s, when I was stationed in Hong Kong as the East Asia editor of the Times, the BBC commissioned me to write
Last week, Michael Gove marked an important moment in the coalition government’s school reforms. The number of academies — that is, state schools granted independent status — reached 407, twice the number created in almost a decade of Labour’s academy programme. Since September, schools have become academies at the rate of one a day. But
For a jihadi, Britain is one of the very best places in the world. In Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, overhead drones kill terrorists on a regular basis. In most democratic countries, politicians try to limit their enemies’ ability to operate — so one runs the risk of being thrown into prison, if caught mid-jihad. But
Years — actually decades — ago, a gentleman from the British civil service, interviewing me as a potential candidate for a job in the European Commission, explained that ‘all the important decisions in Brussels are prepared by the chefs’. As he spoke, I had a vision of men in tall white hats stirring dishes on