Over the years, I’ve often written about Israel and not always in a flattering light. After President Rabin was assassinated — his wife once told me that she preferred Arafat to Netanyahu any day — I lost all hope that reason, wisdom and humanity might prevail in the Holy Land. I keep returning to a
When my uncle was a boy, he said, he was leading a horse down a hill near North Weald in Essex. The horse was pulling a wagon loaded with cabbages, and my uncle had got down, he said, to assist the horse because the hill was a steep one. The war was on. The hill
When the only man I’ve ever come close to marrying moved out after I broke off the engagement, he left me with his tropical fish. I begged him not to, but the separation arrangements included the absolute stipulation that I keep the fish tank. If I insisted on him taking the fish tank, he made
I wouldn’t normally take my wife and children to Dumfries and Galloway for the weekend, given the distance and the expense, but the organisers of the Wigtown Literary Festival offered to pay all our rail fares and put us up for the weekend. Wigtown was designated Scotland’s national book town by the Scottish Parliament in
Seeing me leaving the races early one day recently a friend inquired why. ‘Got to finish some painting,’ I replied. ‘Oh, really,’ he said in surprise. ‘Do you do watercolours or oils?’ I would have said, ‘No, walls,’ but he might then have imagined I did murals, so I had to explain that, surrounded as
If the cap fits… There can’t be many people who can wear a quartered and tasselled silver cricket cap without looking as if they’re searching for a Hackett window display to stand in. But New Zealand captain Richie McCaw managed it the other day in the sheeting rain at Auckland on the occasion of his
Q. The person with whom I used to march, before he had to sell up, is hostile to my plan to allow wind turbines on my land. He still lives nearby and his view will be affected. He is utterly opposed on environmental grounds — the noise, the despoilation of the skyline, the fact that wind
The Playboy Club on Park Lane was re-opened by Hugh Hefner in June, like an ancient bra he had suddenly remembered was lying under his bed. It has a casino, a bar, a barber’s shop, and a restaurant. My being here is pure masochism, and I should really write the review in the style of
When the friends of John Wycliffe set about translating the Bible, about 650 years ago, they came to the bit in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians about charity, ‘which endureth all things’, and chose to make their own translation: ‘susteyneth alle thingis’. The Latin word it translated was sustinet and the original Greek
