Diary

What explains the extraordinary success of Fifty Shades of Grey? This question has been much skirted around but, as far as I know, no one has come up with what seems to me the obvious answer: a large proportion of women are to some degree closet masochists. Of course it’s an embarrassing thing to admit,

Looking back, there was a moment right at the start when the coalition government could have asserted its authority, and changed the political weather. As soon as they took office, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and George Osborne should have said, quite truly, that they were dealing with the catastrophic economic inheritance of the previous government,

A few years back, Julian Maclaren-Ross was a forgotten writer. Today his wonderful books, such as Of Love and Hunger, are back in print, and on Monday, along with his biographer Paul Willetts, I took part in a centenary celebration of his life, with film of the man himself and of many of his contemporaries,

It is never a good idea for a government to look stupid: least of all now. Yet that is what is happening over Lords reform. Nick Clegg wanted to wreck our currency. He failed. Then he wanted to wreck the voting system: another failure. He has now transferred his wrecking petulance to the House of

House of Lords reform is like a dose of the clap: it may feel good at the time, but the result is an unending pain in the proverbials. I can’t, er, speak from personal experience, but even the briefest glance at the government’s plans to elect the Lords makes the point. The new bill comes

The details for my appearance at the Leveson Inquiry arrive. ‘If Mr Walters is content to walk through the public entrance to the RCJ, Bell Yard North One is closest to the Hearing Room. Could you provide names of anyone accompanying Mr Walters in order that we can reserve seats in the public gallery.’ It

A welcome call from son in California: as usual it takes five minutes at least to balance the mental time-of-day differences. In theory, I could call him at four o’clock my time and he’d be awake — just; but I’d have had seven hours to get used to being awake, he’s only just (reluctantly)started. Which

The best moment during my trip around America was at a charter school in San Lorenzo, California. Talking to a group of children, I asked one of them, Michael, a slightly sulky-looking Hispanic boy, where he would be if he was not at this school. ‘Juvie,’ he replied. The other children explained that he meant

Whenever, in an idle moment, I dip into one of my own books, I am almost immediately consumed by an unstoppable fou rire. It is immodest of me to make this confession, but I find my own work irresistibly funny. It pleases me to know that other more illustrious authors whom I admire are also

This month has been the launching season for my new collection of poems, Nefertiti in the Flak Tower. Not many younger people, I have been discovering, know what a flak tower is, or was. Perhaps I should have called the book something else. One of the poems in the book is called ‘Whitman and the

It is unusual in Canada to have had the same address for 60 years, and for an urban house to have ten acres around it (testimony to my father’s foresight), and these facts made it especially painful not to set eyes on my home for five years while I struggled in the American Gulag. It

Bidden to the Barbican for the Bauhaus exhibition, I trekked from the eponymous underground station. I noted that there are many steps from the platform to the street, perhaps a little steeper than the norm, for I kept catching my crutches on them. Across the road, the narrow steps into the Barbican — a mean

I am extremely lucky and have a charmed life. But this is a hard-luck story. And like much journalistic endeavour, it’s drawn from a wellspring of bitterness and resentment. Recently I was invited to Mustique. It’s a bland paradise. The beaches are raked each morning, as is the sand underneath the trees just behind the

No great April Fool’s Day spoof this year. The best ever was in Panorama on 1 April 1957. I was mildly connected with it — I was on the Panorama production team that devised it, though I did not think of it or produce it. It was a film of the spaghetti harvest in Italy.

This week marked seven years since I agreed to quit my civil service career to become a political adviser to Gordon Brown, and three years since I was forced to quit that new role in shame. Following my resignation, I put my last vestige of professional pride into denying the chasing media pack the chance

Last summer when I was staying with my friend India Knight in Cornwall she said I absolutely must join Twitter. Besides being a Sunday Times columnist, she is a Twitter queen, No. 73 in the Top Twit 100, with 57,000 followers. Better still, she has a ‘peer index rating’ — whatever that is — of

Vienna. I’m here on the first leg of a short three-city tour for my new novel — Eine Grosse Zeit in German. The weather is sensational, warm and sunny, and even though we’re still firmly in March and there isn’t a leaf on a tree, Vienna’s cafés have their tables out on the sidewalk wherever

Asked to write a diary for The Spectator, my first reaction was: ‘Why me?’ To sit down at my laptop and write — rather than read a script — feels a bit strange. I am still getting used to people wanting to know about me. A mere nine weeks ago I was anonymous, now I

I’m a cowardly traveller. I’m not afraid of trains, planes, cars — just of change, and of elsewhere. Months ago I agreed to go with my colleagues from Bath Spa University to a conference of creative writing programmes in Chicago. As the time approaches, I resent that past self who said yes: foolishly enthusiastic, deluded