Tokyo is visual chaos everywhere, the antithesis of the Japanese interior. It is a multilevel jumble of overpasses, neon signs, electric pylons, railway lines and traffic lights. The pavements are empty, not a pedestrian human in sight. And the leader of North Korea is still lobbing ballistic missiles right over Japan and cackling away about
The first presidential debate was a disappointment. Half an hour into the big Trump-Clinton show on Long Island, many among the audience must have asked themselves why they weren’t watching The Real Housewives of Orange County instead. The strangest exchange concerned how to defeat Isis. Donald Trump said, ‘They’re beating us at our own game
Most nights Saudi bombers fly low over the Yemeni capital of Sanaa dealing out random destruction. High up in the Yemeni mountains, Sanaa claims to be the oldest inhabited city in the world. Its old city, a Unesco world heritage site, is at least as unique, ancient and priceless as any western city. Many of
Lido di Dante, Ravenna When the earthquake struck in the dead of night at 3.36 a.m. — the Devil’s Hour — I was in front of my computer in what used to be the cow shed. This is the only time of day when my six boisterous children and their high-voltage Italian mother are not
How strange it is to be watching the Olympic Games on television. No wonder people have such rum ideas of what the whole thing is about. This is the first time I’ve watched the Games on telly since 1984; the next seven times I was in the city of choice, working for a newspaper. My
It has been a strange week in Munich; a week of deceptively cool mornings, afternoons hot enough to fry eggs and thunderstorms at twilight that have turned streets into streams. A week of reflection, too, capped last Sunday by a service of remembrance in the cathedral, attended by Chancellor Merkel, to honour the nine young
In the few days I’ve spent in Paris, I’d say the terror alert level is fluctuating between a little antsy, really quite nervous and eye-twitching, hair-tearing, run for your lives woo-woo. People still go about their business, but there are wary looks on the Metro and a palpable sense that they could really do without
Ipanema, Brazil Another Sunday night, yet another episode of Game of Thrones drowned out by pot-banging and angry folk yelling into the night. In my quiet corner of Ipanema, a slanging match takes place as middle-class tenants of a high-rise apartment start slandering their neighbours in the favela below. The words ‘cow’ and ‘communist’, among others,
Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Highway 61 crosses 49 and Robert Johnson met the Devil, who taught him the secret of the blues. Out of the blues came Elvis, rock and roll, most of today’s popular music. My wife Linda was born here when Clarksdale was ‘the golden buckle of the Cotton Belt’. At the height of
I have been driving many hundreds of miles across America, interviewing Vietnam veterans for a book. Though I have been doing this sort of thing for 40 years, the fascination of the serendipity persists. I meet an extraordinary variety of people, way outside my usual social round. Some talk in modest bungalows, others in motels,
I had been trying to get to Aleppo for ages, but was unable to do so because rebel activity had cut off the city from the outside world. Syrian government military successes at the start of January meant there was at last a safe road. I hired a driver, was allocated a government minder (very
The terrible news that Henry Worsley had died just 30 miles short of crossing the Antarctic continent unsupported reached me just after I returned from the South Atlantic. We had been in the very stretch of ocean that a relative of his somehow navigated for 800 miles in a tiny boat with Sir Ernest Shackleton
Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, Morocco: if I had picked anywhere else on the Mediterranean for a family holiday, at least anywhere that’s not convulsed by civil war, I don’t think anyone would have noticed. But when I told friends that we were taking our children to Israel on vacation, I got some odd looks.
I am writing on the morning that President Obama is to deliver his last State of the Union address. You, reader, therefore know what he has said. I can only guess. ‘We have come so far… yet there remains so much to do.’ Did I get it right? Yet ‘much to do’ only mildly describes the
In their interview in the Christmas edition of The Spectator, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth asked the Prime Minister whether he now considered that his intervention in Libya had been a mistake. David Cameron accepted that matters could have gone better since the fall of Gaddafi, but insisted that ‘what we were doing was preventing
This time last year I was running around excitedly telling all my friends that I had an African president in the family, something none of them could boast. My younger daughter Theo is married to Sasha Scott, son of Dr Guy Scott, who was president of Zambia from October 2014 to January 2015, and the
Margaret River, Western Australia I’m here for a food festival, and to help along my autobiography. The Blonde had cashed in turn-left, en-suite tickets, and said we were going to take the twins. I pulled faces and sucked my teeth, and whined that it was an awful long way, and it would mostly be work.
I’ve spent much of the autumn and winter shooting my new TV series for BBC1. New Blood looks at the so-called ‘Y’ generation and focuses on two 25-year-olds who fight crime but who spend as much time worrying about their university loans, finding somewhere to live, arguing with each other and trying to kick-start their
As I strolled through the aisles in a large department store, I almost choked when I read a large display that blared: ‘Don’t forget to treat your pussy at Christmas…’ with relief I read the rest of the ad: ‘…and your bow-wow too!’ Beneath the dubious banner lay a massive display of beautifully wrapped chew
Oddly enough, the cabin service people on the plane are constantly eating during the night, helping themselves to the first-class snacks. They are bulging out of their uniforms. They cannot pass each other in the aisles without difficulty. This is the sort of thing you notice during a long flight; at least the sort of
