Toby Young

To my astonishment, the tsunami that swept through the global financial markets last week actually affected one of my neighbours. When the credit crunch extends as far as Acton, you know Gordon Brown’s in trouble. It turns out the man in question was an employee of Lehman Brothers. He’d managed to secure a job there

It was the call I’d been dreading. Roger Cashmore, the Principal of Brasenose College, phoned to ask whether I would be willing to give a speech on behalf of the alumni at the College Gaudy. It was the 25th anniversary of the class that had matriculated in 1983 and I had already RSVPd. How was

By the time you read this I may be dead. I have been pressganged into taking part in the London Duathlon this Sunday in order to raise money for the Chelsea and Westminster Health Charity. A canny young man who works for the charity noticed a reference to the paediatric unit at Chelsea and Westminster

In the current issue of Empire there is a piece by Bob Weide, the director of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, in which he says that the reason I was banned from the set of the film is because Kirsten Dunst insisted on it. I was not aware of this until now, but

I am currently in Cornwall where I am spending the last week of August with my family. I cannot claim to have been basking in sunshine — the weather here is no better than the rest of the country — but I am luxuriating in the warm glow that comes from being on an environmentally

New York’s Eurotrash exude a preening self- regard that makes me sick to my stomach In New York, the big story of the summer is that the Eurotrash are back. Thanks to the weak dollar, rich Europeans have been descending on the city by the jet-load, irritating the locals by referring to ludicrously overpriced luxury

These days, I can’t even afford to rent a trailer on Shelter Island As a young man living in New York, I used to club together with four or five friends every summer and rent a house on Shelter Island. About 80 miles from New York, it is close enough to the Hamptons to enjoy

At first, I thought the reason the British Consul General in Los Angeles had agreed to have lunch with me was because he knew who I was. Before setting off on my annual pilgrimage to Hollywood, I had emailed Bob Peirce to see if he might be able to squeeze in a quick drink. I

There have been many wise and learned discussions about the impact the internet has had on journalism. However, one area that has been neglected is the impact it has had on the egos of journalists. I don’t mean the bruised feelings that Matt Drudge’s success has caused among the higher echelons of the American intelligentsia.

Should I have forced myself to accept a diseased prisoner’s licked spoon? Like most Englishman, how well mannered I am depends upon the social status of the person I am interacting with. If he is below me in the pecking order, I am unfailingly polite, bending over backwards to reassure him that I do not

I was told at a very early stage in my writing career never to seek revenge on critics. If you get a poor review, you just have to take it on the chin. To write a letter of complaint to the publication in question — or, worse, punch the critic on the nose — is

Last Saturday, I was due to attend a garden party being hosted by one of my oldest friends, but I did not have time. After picking up four-year-old Sasha from swimming I had to take her to a party, then pick her up from that party and take her to another, then take three-year-old Ludo

Being muzzled is a very frustrating experience for a journalist. When the story broke last week that Sean Langan had been kidnapped in a remote region of Pakistan — he was released on 21 June after a long and tortuous negotiation — I got a stream of email messages from mutual friends saying, ‘Did you

My father was a lifelong socialist. He joined the Labour party at the age of 16 and at the time of his death, 70 years later, he was a Labour member of the House of Lords. He was a fairly typical left-winger in that he preferred the company of the poor to the rich and

If I try to take Manhattan again, I’ll fail completely. Perfect! Well, my wife had the baby. I am now a father of four and, as such, have been doing some thinking about how I am going to support them all in the years to come. My problem is, I do not really have a

Did my wife really mean it when she said I didn’t have to be present at the birth? By the time you read this, I will be the proud father of another baby. That is the plan, anyway. My wife has had enough of being pregnant and has booked herself into hospital to be induced.

‘See that pot plant?’ said Jeremy Clarkson. ‘I could get a column out of that.’ We were at a supper party in Hay and indulging in that parlour game often played by newspaper columnists whereby we try to outdo each other when it comes to the ingenuity with which we can transform any subject, no

In order to tell you the following story I’m going to have to make an embarrassing admission: I LexisNexis myself every day. That is to say, I plug my own name into LexisNexis, the online cuttings service, to see if any stories have appeared about me in the past 24 hours. In terms of vanity,

I never thought I’d claim I was quoted ‘out of context’ — until I went to Cannes ‘Memo to writers and others,’ wrote Kingsley Amis. ‘Never make a joke against yourself that some little bastard can turn into a piece of shit and send your way.’ I should have borne this in mind when I