More from life

Compassion is fashionable again. Thank the Pope

There was something poignant about the decision of L’Wren Scott, Mick Jagger’s American girlfriend, who committed suicide in New York last month, to leave everything she had to him in her will. Maybe it was out of gratitude for his help in keeping her foundering fashion business afloat; or maybe it was just a mark

Toby Young

The books I couldn’t get written

There’s nothing quite so burdensome as having a book to write. Maybe it’s not so bad when it’s your first book, but after that it’s a terrible chore. The publishing industry doesn’t help by paying authors up front. The temptation to pocket the advance and not deliver the manuscript is overwhelming. Believe me, when Douglas

America’s crazy war on old pianos

More than 20 years ago, when I was living in New York, I wrote an article about the mutilation by the United States government of a fine old piano on the pretext of saving the African elephant. The piano was a 1920 concert grand from the once famous Parisian house of Érard, from which came

Why the other jockeys love Jamie Moore

In the parade ring just after Sire De Grugy had won this year’s Queen Mother Champion Chase, I found myself among a group of jockeys who had run out of the weighing room jostling and joshing like a bunch of schoolkids. They had, though, a serious purpose: they had emerged to pay tribute to one

Toby Young

Lessons from Tina Brown on the art of failing upwards

Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I write an article about the number of New York society types who were bankrupt. Not morally bankrupt, but up to their eyeballs in debt. ‘Let’s get a team of researchers to go through the financials

Toby Young

I was all for press freedom. Then I heard from Gary Lineker…

It looks as though Hacked Off has finally won its three-year battle for tighter regulation of the press. Why do I say this? Because on Tuesday it published a list of 200 people who agree with them in various national newspapers. These weren’t just the usual suspects — Hugh Grant, Rowan Williams, Richard Curtis. And

Death brings out everyone’s inner Mary Whitehouse

Shortly after Bob Crow’s death was announced on Tuesday, Nigel Farage sent the following tweet: ‘Sad at the death of Bob Crow. I liked him and he also realised working-class people were having their chances damaged by the EU.’ Cue a predictable storm of Twitter outrage. Farage was attacked for trying to make political capital

I want to age like the Three Tenors

In February each year the Oldie magazine gives ‘Oldie of the Year Awards’ to people who show unusual vigour and enterprise in old age. This year’s winner was Mary Berry, the cookery teacher, who at 78 had achieved sudden fame as a presenter and judge on the BBC television show The Great British Bake Off.

How Paul Bittar has kept British racing together

British racing is such a quirky minefield that some were surprised when in 2011 the authorities chose Paul Bittar, a man from Wagga Wagga with most of his racecourse experience in New Zealand and the state of Victoria, to run the British Horseracing Authority. Australian cricketers, it used to be said, had a standard uniform:

What’s happened to Harriet Harman?

Watching Harriet Harman being interviewed by Laura Kuenssberg on Newsnight earlier this week was a strange experience. I felt as if I’d entered a political twilight zone where nothing was quite as it seemed. Was the deputy leader of the Labour party really saying these things? I knew she was, but it seemed so miscalculated

Playground bullies and the contradiction at the heart of democracy

A new book by a Swedish psychiatrist has just come out that I like the sound of. It’s called How Children Took Power and argues that the child-centred approach to parenting that’s been popular in Scandinavia since the 1960s has created a nation of ouppfostrade, which roughly translates as ‘bad children’. Dr David Eberhard, a

The Grand National needs kinder weather

This year you don’t want to be a jockey’s valet. Never have their washing machines spun so vigorously. From every sortie, riders return as mud-spattered as if they had been trampled by a dozen rugby scrums, and so many of us gathered at the Abbey Road Studios to hear the weights to be carried in

Was Graham Greene right about Shirley Temple? 

Shirley Temple, who died last week at the age of 85, was the most successful child film star in history. During the second half of the 1930s, a decade in which she made 23 films and earned $3 million before puberty, she was America’s most popular film star of any kind; Clark Gable came only