One of the best things about being a writer is that you get asked to interesting places. I’ve always turned everything down because I believed I should sit at my desk and write. About six months ago, I decided to see what would happen if I accepted everything for a while. Admittedly, I had a kick-start. My BBC film Page Eight, about the moral ructions in MI5 in the past ten years, was given the unusual honour, for a TV film, of closing the Toronto Film Festival. So I went to Toronto (refreshing), then to Edinburgh (uplifting), Warsaw (fascinating), Rome (matchless), Hamburg (serious), Jaipur (fabulous), Eastbourne (serene) and Gothenburg (-14°C). During this period of traipsing down red carpets and giving multilingual Q&As (best audience question in Gothenburg: ‘Where did you buy that coat?’), I’ve written more than usual. It turns out that travel doesn’t distract, it concentrates.
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It’s great for me to be back at The Spectator, where I’ve been absent for as long as Cliff Richard from Radio One. One of my first jobs round about 1970 was to review detective stories in these pages for an editor Private Eye nicknamed George G. Ale. With his red hair and a rusty-needle gramophone bark you don’t hear any more, Gale was said to be frightening, but the effect was comic. He was more like a dog than a man, yapping and complaining all day. My field of expertise was expanded, for reasons no one explained, to include sex manuals, so I was landed with reviewing the work of Masters and Johnson. They were American sexologists, always described, like all sexologists, as ‘pioneering’. When I quoted their bizarre recommendation for how men might avoid premature ejaculation, Gale refused to print.
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