Writing
The lure of the spy novel
Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film…
The expensive business of quoting poetry
Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of…
Pity the restaurant critic
An atom is made of protons, electrons and neutrons, and protons are made of quarks, and a quark is the…
What will become of George Orwell’s archives?
The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the…
A.A. Milne and the torturous task of writing
For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month…
Letter from Thailand
Many of my friends, stranded by the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, have temporarily given up their film projects and…
Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter
Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter
The reactionary bohemian: Jeremy Clarke was one of a kind
Modestly brilliant, dedicatedly hedonistic — Jeremy Clarke was a complete one-off
Turkey is at an existential crossroads
The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside…
The strange inspiration of the Gobi desert
The first time I went to Mongolia was in 2014, when I travelled across the country with the actress Michelle…
Why your more successful friends will drop you
How success kills friendships
Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?
Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?
A vroom of one’s own: how I loved my old Mini
Oh how I loved my old Mini
I’ve written the perfect book
I met a Canadian couple for lunch in Edinburgh. They were from Vancouver – he a judge, she an opera…
Does knotted string constitute ‘writing’?
What particularly excites Silvia Ferrara, the author of The Greatest Invention, is not language per se but writing – that…
Is this Premier Inn all I’ll be remembered for?
It’s fairly commonplace for people to wonder what, if anything, they’ll be remembered for. I’m going to be 59 later…
Howard Jacobson superbly captures the terrible cost of becoming a writer
Howard Jacobson, who turns 80 this year, published his first novel aged 40. Since then he has produced roughly a…
What Putin has in common with Hitler
We are always cautioned against comparing a modern political event with those that led up to the second world war.…
The delicate business of writing poetry
Living, as Clive James put it, under a life sentence, and having refused chemotherapy, I find I respond to the…
P.J. O’Rourke’s death marks the end of a great satirical era
Fond memories of the great satirist
The hypocrisy of actors
I’ve been keeping a journal for nearly 60 years. There are piles of the damn things in archives and covered…
The moment I fell in love with music
I’ve lived in Chelsea for the past 35 years. Since 2002, I’ve photographed everything I find interesting here — churches,…
Why is Microsoft offended by ‘Mrs Thatcher’?
The interregnum between incumbents is a well-known and often elongated process in the Church of England. I have recently witnessed…
