The best thing about being a playwright? The satisfaction of creativity. The worst? Press-night parties attended by friends, industry people and celebs. Playwright Terry Johnson says he knows writers who find such occasions so hellish they’ve been put off writing plays altogether. The problem is the corrosive, deeply unsettling belief that everyone is lying to
Departing Gatwick train station, with nine minutes till Crawley, I tried to get in the head of a Chagossian. In 2002, Tony Blair gave everyone from the Chagos Islands British citizenship, permitting 10,000 Chagossians to live wherever they liked in the UK. About 3,500 have chosen Crawley. And what a weird thing to do. They
Nolo episcopari. These were the words a person was expected to say on being offered an episcopal see. It basically translates as ‘Don’t bishop me!’ and goes back to at least St Ambrose, who so wanted to avoid being made a bishop that he skipped town. The Church of England has worked itself into a
For those of us who grew up during the Cold War, it’s heartbreaking to watch the western countries fail to defend the interests of liberal democracy. The free world is being challenged on three fronts, by Russia, Iran and China, all of whom threaten the international order established so painstakingly after the second world war.
Double jab, right, hook body, duck, right… Right, left, right, upper, four hooks… Ten straight punches… And ten more… Twenty roundhouse kicks… Now the other leg… When I tell people that I’ve started kickboxing, they tend to think they’ve misheard. It’s true I’m not who one might think of as a typical fighter. I’ve spent
The Foreign Secretary David Lammy will touch down in Beijing next week to pay his respects. Next year, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is expected to do the same. We haven’t seen this level of deference to the Chinese Communist party since 2019. Back then, Philip Hammond heaped praise on his hosts. He endorsed their Belt
Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love – or it’s supposed to be. William Penn, good Quaker that he was, wanted his city to be a place of religious and political tolerance; a haven for those who’d been persecuted for their beliefs. There are quotations inscribed on walls everywhere about the power of love, selflessness
I was growing impatient with a recent blog by Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, promising progress, universal prosperity, ‘a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics’ through artificial intelligence. I won’t go over that ground now, because I suddenly sat up at a passing remark he made: ‘Nobody is looking back at the past,
At home, the left sees him as cynical, conniving and corrupt; while the right sees him as tired, weak and unambitious. Abroad, he is almost universally loathed and distrusted. And yet no one can deny his Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international. Modern history has produced only two figures who
Electricity is magical stuff. From a couple of tiny holes in a wall comes an apparently endless supply of invisible, weightless, silent ether that turns instantly into light, heat, motion or information at your command. It is a metaphor for the modern economy: we use pure energy to create useful outcomes in the real world.
You find me in the south of France, holed up in that inn of near perfection called La Colombe d’Or in St Paul de Vence. I escape here twice a year and marvel at how little has changed since the 1950s, when it was Mecca for artists of all types, painters such as Chagall and
In the late summer of 2009, Andrew Neil invited me to his villa in the Côte d’Azur but didn’t say why. I was mystified. I was then political editor of The Spectator and in eight years of working closely with Andrew, the then chairman, he’d never hinted that he saw me as an editor. I
Iran has fallen into the trap set by Israel. It has taken the bait after months of failing to respond to a series of devastating – and humiliating – attacks, which decapitated its Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, and killed the leader of Hamas in Tehran. But the regime may have self-immolated by firing missiles at Israel
Chinese nationalism is a mixture of self-pity and cultural arrogance Ten-year-old Shen Hangping was walking to school when he was stabbed. Japanese on his father’s side, Chinese on his mother’s, he was a pupil at the Japanese School in Shenzhen. There are only a small number of these expat schools across China, and they have
On a Saturday morning, no life stirs. The village café is closed and the ancient church of St Beuno’s is locked and deserted. Beside the stone porch stands a dusty glass case that advertises church services and parish gatherings. Not a single event is scheduled. This is the peaceful village of Botwnnog (pronounced Bot-oon-awg) in
There were many tributes paid to the Jersey aid worker Simon Boas when he died of throat cancer in July, aged 47. In writing and speaking about his terminal diagnosis with courage and humour, he was admired on the island and beyond. My mother-in-law, having spent years working with aid charities, lives on Jersey and
There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is that a combination of complacency, arrogance and the failure to get the public onside is what did for hunting. It’s not really fair: arguably, without the disaster of the Iraq war, Tony Blair may not
Béziers, France The École Mairan in Béziers in southern France is a happy neighbourhood elementary school housed in a superb renovated 19th-century hôtel particulier. In the middle of the medieval city, surrounded by both great houses and humbler tenements, it is attended by 120 pupils aged six to 11. There are the children of Algerian
This week in New York Volodymyr Zelensky will present Joe Biden with a ‘Victory Plan’ for Ukraine. But how to define what ‘victory’ actually means? A fundamental and fast-widening distance is opening up over that question between Zelensky and his western allies – as well as inside Ukraine itself. Zelensky insists that the bottom line
The American general David Petraeus famously asked of the invasion of Iraq: ‘Tell me how this ends.’ That’s the question as Israeli bombs and missiles fall on Lebanon and the few missiles Hezbollah has sent in response are intercepted. Iran’s ‘axis of resistance’ seems paralysed with indecision. Does Benjamin Netanyahu take this as a win,