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
Some time in the olden days, an Irishman called St Piran took the trouble to float over the ocean on a millstone and land in Cornwall, with the purpose of introducing the natives to tin-mining and Christianity. Today, the mines are closed and the inhabitants under the age of 75 are indifferent to the saint’s
When we switched on the BBC’s 6 o’clock news on 18 February, we had no idea that it was the day of Whitney Houston’s funeral, and even less that the coverage of this sad event would blot out all other news. So we expected the item to come to an end. But it never did.
When I took the job as director of the BBC’s coverage of London 2012, my cousin asked if anything about the job kept me awake at night. The truth is nothing — so far. I can see that Britain’s television screens going black at the start of the 100 metres final would be bad, since
We are not made incrementally aware of things that happen incrementally. Though something may have been changing for a while, the realisation comes all at once in a swoop, usually when it’s far too late. I realised that I had become a ‘madam’ last weekend, in the butcher’s. We had a bit of a joke,
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
Try as I might, I can’t pretend even to myself that the Cambridge Union debate against Katie Price was anything but a total victory for tits and telly, and an utter defeat for me. What was I thinking? But still. Last week I found myself at the Cambridge Union in a tight red dress, proposing
I have a book out this week and, as always, it’s a torrid time, alternating between delight at good reviews (A.N. Wilson in this magazine) and despair at the massacres (the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton in the Guardian). It was just after one such dark assessment of my future that happier news arrived from an
To Moscow! To Moscow! Recently I was in Russia as a guest of the British Council. My friend Damian Barr hosts a regular literary salon in London, and the idea was to put one on here, with the poet and essayist Linor Goralik, the novelist Alexander Ilichevsky, the publisher Dan Franklin and me. Extraliterary considerations: