Diary

I am re-reading D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia. The opening line runs: ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move…’ He expands on the dilemma (I paraphrase): you are afflicted by wanderlust, you want to move, you don’t have any money, you’ve only recently moved but for some reason you want to move again. It

Well, what a year it has been. Another one full of financial doom and gloom. I’ve never known such a prolonged period of anxiety and pessimism in my lifetime. With our breakfast news we imbibe daily the latest glum forecasts. George Osborne talks of a ‘healing’ of the UK economy but at the same time

Finding an outfit for a wedding is a doddle compared with finding one for an investiture and I wonder how sensible it was to buy my hat first. I love hats. My mother was a dressmaker and designer and she also made hats and wore them with style and aplomb, in the days when women

As I returned to the House of Commons, it was clear I had swapped one jungle for another. For the last few weeks I have been in Australia filming I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! and the Conservative leadership were less than impressed. In desperation to prevent me from taking part, No. 10

I once bred a racehorse, half-owned by my mother, born at my mother-in-law’s farm in Suffolk and named ‘Green Moon’ by my daughter. He won a race or two but never found his form, so we sold him to an Australian for not much. A few days ago, I was woken by a 5a.m. phone

I have just returned from sunny Los Angeles, visiting Simon Cowell, the subject of my most recent biography. He told me about a visit by Cheryl Cole to his amazing house in Beverly Hills to patch up their arguments. ‘My book is number 1,’ boasted Cheryl. ‘Mine was number 1 for six weeks,’ countered Cowell, enjoying a

People constantly ask travel writers: where are you going next? They hope to hear about a camel-party in Mongolia. But last week I had to answer blandly: Italy. I travelled with my wife to a friend’s wedding on Lake Orta among the Italian lakes, where the bride arrived by boat at the garlanded jetty of

Air Canada has outwitted the superstorm and I am about to return to Canada after my nine-day stay in London following an absence of seven years, and nine years since I actually lived there. I was launching the British edition of my book, A Matter of Principle, which describes the legal onslaught against me in

In the October sunshine I have been watching the academic year’s new debtors unloading their electronic possessions from the cars of mothers with hair in 50 shades of grey. After nearly 40 years of teaching in Oxford, I am enraged that the undergraduates have been rebranded. They are now ‘consumers’ and from their first day

Straight off the overnight plane from a work trip to Miami I head for Paddy Power in Camberwell. I think I know what the result of the American election is going to be. Luckily for me (or perhaps for them) they are still closed so I wheel my suitcase home and the moment passes. My

This week sees the 30th anniversary of the death (or ‘untimely death’, as death is now invariably known) of Glenn Gould. The fame of most classical musicians tends to wither when they die, but Gould’s seems to grow and grow: his grave is the most visited in Canada, he has appeared on The Simpsons, and not

In Scandinavia, gene therapists have invented a virus that may treat the cancer that killed multi-billionaire Steve Jobs — but are going to have to throw it out, because of lack of cash. I am in Uppsala, Sweden, sitting among pipettes and centrifuges, helping the professor in charge to set up a rescue fund for

I’m just back from Chicago, Washington and New York where I’ve been making a film on Obama’s four years, and still shaking off the jetlag. It’s been a hot early autumn there, after a scorching summer; but nobody on the campaign trail seems to be talking about climate change. Or indeed about anything except the

My postbag is mostly things like: ‘I once played tennis against you in the Provence in 1981. My daughter is now bicycling through Spain to raise money and I wondered… .’ So picture my surprise to get one that instead began like this:  ‘In your novel Engleby, the hero mentions a gig by Procol Harum

In Edinburgh to speak about my new novel Zoo Time at the book festival. I love it up here, watching the rain lashing the austere grey terraces, dodging the street clowns who don’t really belong in so serious a place, visiting the Victorian dead in the marvellously voluble Dean Cemetery (it’s the stones that do

When in 2009 I published a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster it provoked contrasting responses from two members of the royal family. Prince Charles, protesting that he was ‘bemused’ by my views on climate change, struck me off his Christmas card list, where I had been for 25 years since we became environmental

And so the Olympics are done. I am still reeling from the information — I simply cannot unremember it — that two million people applied for tickets to the final of the men’s 100m, 80,000 of them succeeding. The race was over in less time than it has taken you to read this little nugget.