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
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
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
It’s scarcely possible to open a newspaper or magazine these days without reading an article about how the latest technological gizmo has rendered traditional education obsolete. According to Justin Webb, a presenter on the Today programme, it’s no longer necessary to commit any facts to memory thanks to the never-ending miracle that is Google. ‘Knowing
Waitrose in Towcester has closed down for a week to make what it describes as ‘a final few touches’ to an ‘exciting’ refurbishment. We will see just how exciting this is when the store reopens this weekend with its ‘improved customer toilets’, ‘improved café’, and so on. But forgive me for being a little sceptical,
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
My house in south Northamptonshire looks out over parkland on which Henry VIII used to hunt deer with Anne Boleyn. The only deer on it nowadays are the unhunted muntjacs, charmless little creatures that only arrived in England from Asia 400 years later; but there still are plenty of foxes, which carry out periodic massacres
No sporting event anywhere compresses so much drama, emotion and character into a single venue as the Cheltenham Festival. It wasn’t just an extraordinary Gold Cup — in that six horses jumped the last with a chance of winning and at least two jockeys will go to their graves believing they were denied a victory
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
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
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.
The new mayor of New York, who despite his name (Bill de Blasio) claims Irish ancestry, is boycotting this month’s St Patrick’s Day Parade because its organisers refuse to allow a contingent of gays and lesbians to march up Fifth Avenue as an identifiable group bearing the insignia of gay pride. This is not exactly
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:
An email popped into my inbox on Tuesday morning urging me to join a ‘fair admissions campaign’ that’s been launched by a couple of mums in Shepherd’s Bush. Their children are at a local primary school and they’re angry that they won’t be able to get them into any of the local faith schools. ‘Two
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
With regard to modern technology, I find that people of around my age — by which I mean people in their seventies or over — are divided into two camps. There are those who have embraced the digital revolution with embarrassing enthusiasm, knowing much more about it than it is decent to know; and then
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
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
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
Two new books have been published recently on the thorny issue of social mobility, one optimistic, suggesting various things parents can do to maximise their children’s chances of success, the other pessimistic, concluding that a child’s fate is more or less sealed at birth. Paradoxically, the optimistic book is incredibly depressing, while the pessimistic one
