Diary

I was sad to hear about the death of Bob Hope, although hitting 100 is a fabulous record – almost like batting 1,000. I worked with Bob several times on his television variety shows and once in a movie, Road to Hong Kong. In the four previous Road films with Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour had

It’s no good complaining. The rail network inhabits the wrong kind of universe. If the sun shines for more than two days, the network goes down. You can’t argue with science. In the last heatwave I travelled back to London from Brighton in a train whose air-conditioning had given up under the strain. I rang

As I was staggering round Highbury Fields in a pair of shorts, I saw one I knew and hailed him crying, ‘Tom!’, because it was Tom Baldwin, the political reporter of the Times and arch-friend of Alastair Campbell. To my surprise, there was not a flicker on those Shelleyesque features. He continued his stride. ‘Tom!’

I am invited to the Oxford Union to speak in the last debate of the term. I had originally been invited to speak on the death of feminism earlier in the year, but as I couldn’t go they kindly invited me back. The motion is less onerous – ‘Life is too short to drink cheap

An eagerly anticipated lunch-date with our sainted proprietor’s wife. A la page as always, Barbara wanted to try the restaurant above Mourad Mazouz’s blindingly chic nightclub Sketch in Conduit Street. The Lecture Room notoriously costs about a million a mouthful, but they have dreamed up some wonderful and weird ways of making you feel it’s

I am summoned to No. 10 for a one-on-one with the Prime Minister. These ‘landscape chats’, as his spin doctors call them, are, of course, strictly off the record. But I don’t think I am breaking a confidence in revealing that, as we sit on the terrace outside the Cabinet room, I witness a seriously

On Saturday, I shall be beside the Eiffel Tower, hoping to see David Millar win the Prologue of the centennial Tour de France. Until last year, I’d long followed the Tour at a distance, but never in person. Then I was asked to write a history of the race, and to cover it for the

The word ‘traitor’ seems to be bandied about a good deal at present. ‘So you’re a traitor, then,’ said the complacently smiling lady sitting next to my husband Harold Pinter at the British Library literary dinner – rather a surprising venue for such an accusation, I thought at the time. They were discussing our recent

To Gateshead to appear on Question Time last Thursday with Nick Brown, Tom Strathclyde, David Steel and Janet Street-Porter. Until the show is filmed at 8.30 p.m., Nick Brown, the Minister for Work, hasn’t been told that he is being sacked in the reshuffle. He certainly doesn’t seem to betray any nervousness as we wander

One of the most exquisite houses I know lies at the head of a valley in Cranborne Chase in Wiltshire. It is not so much the 18th-century architecture of Ashcombe, though it is the surviving portion of a once-grand country house, but more the position, secluded and yet facing down the long, twisting valley to

Long before there was any public outcry that Tony Blair had ‘lied’ about weapons of mass destruction, intelligence sources were worried and some, privately, said so. Perhaps these are the people that John Reid calls ‘rogue elements’, but their complaints were very sober and unrogueish. They were worried about both the dossiers on WMD, but

To Paris to attend a convivium on the Continuing Revolution, presided over by Dr Thomas Fleming. Dr Who? Tom Fleming is editor of the monthly magazine Chronicles, based in Rockford, Illinois, and big chief of the palaeoconservative movement – though movement may be too grand a word to describe an engagingly barmy political army that

Channel 4 outdid itself in ignorance with the dumb, grandiosely titled The 100 Greatest Film Stars of All Time. We tuned in eagerly, expecting to see a cross-section of legendary stars from the 1920s to the present day in fabulous movie clips, and what did we get? Several dozen ‘talking heads’ purporting to be movie

The trouble with holidays is that when you return there is the same work to do and that much less time in which to do it; as well as no time at all, in my case, to acquire a birthday present for my wife or take the limping, mewing cat to the vet. My immediate

I found myself twice debating with Ottilia Saxl, director of the Institute of Nanotechnology, on the radio last week. She assured listeners that I was quite wrong to imply that big business was behind the technology. Governments, she soothed, not corporations, are providing the grants. So what? Governments make bad decisions every day, and most

This is not a statement that will wring many heart-strings, but if there’s one group of professionals which has been a bit down-at-heel in recent months it’s libel lawyers. For a variety of reasons – Jeffrey Archer languishing in jail among them – there has not been a queue of claimants outside the Inns of

As an atheist, I am reluctant to intrude into the private affairs of the Church of England, despite having been baptised into it (I was six weeks old at the time, and had little say in the matter). However, conscious as I am of its residual cultural significance, I have been dismayed by aspects of

If I meet one more smug, smirking pro-war protagonist who greets me with that ‘Hey, peacenik – you must feel a right prat’ look, I fear I shall arm myself with a few of those elusive WMDs and take out whole swaths of Wapping, Kensington and Downing Street. If there’s one thing worse than the

I used to be amused and appalled by the Pentagon-speak which developed during the Vietnam war. But now the almost Stalinist euphemisms and aggressive acronyms have given way to a less extreme form – a military version of corporate-speak. Perhaps this is Donald Rumsfeld’s influence. The new form of allied blitzkrieg is termed Rapid Decisive