Israel

Growing up as a Jew in England, I’ve always felt proud of my heritage. The ugly spectre of anti-Semitism seemed a thing of the past – and it felt safe to share my faith and ancestry with the world. But not any longer. It’s not difficult to see why. In the first half of 2016, there was an 11 per cent spike in the number of anti-Semitic incidents. Britain might still be one of the safest places in the world to be a Jew, but Jews here are increasingly becoming a target. Last year saw the third-highest annual total of anti-Semitic hate incidents in the UK ever recorded. The same

Sixty years ago this week all hell broke loose: Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest and put down a nationalist uprising in a very bloody manner. Down south Anglo-French paratroopers jumped into the Sinai and, in cahoots with the Israelis, took over the Suez Canal in a last gasp of colonialism by the Europeans. And in Washington DC a very peed-off President Eisenhower ordered the Anglo-French to go home or else. They went home and only the Israelis howled that Ike was an anti-Semite and many other things. And where was your intrepid foreign (future High life) correspondent while all this was going on? On an aeroplane flying from New York

After the Fawlty Towers incident, I decided it was best to research the origin and extraction of all future B&B guests on arrival, before the builder boyfriend got stuck in. You may remember that he accidentally on purpose got a piece of gaffa tape caught on his top lip and held some ceiling felt at a jaunty angle during the stay of the Airbnb customers from Bavaria. Thankfully, they were in another room and didn’t see but I had to shush him because he was making a bad job of whispering, ‘Don’t mention Brexit! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it!’ A girl from Taiwan

A long and arduous flight back from the Caucasus, but worth it nonetheless for the meaningful protest we had staged in the fragrant and lovely Georgian capital, Tbilisi. They have opened a vegan restaurant there called the Café Kiwi — an affront not just to ordinary Georgians, but to all right-thinking people, surely. A bunch of us stormed the place carrying large chunks of grilled lamb on skewers and spicy sausages, which we flung at the epicene customers, who cowered beneath their tables and were unable to fight back because their bones had been made as brittle as matchwood by a diet consisting entirely of nuts and berries. ‘Eat some

I got an email this week, from a chap called Harry, which began as follows: ‘I am writing to inform you that I will be carrying out the investigation on behalf of the Labour party into the circumstances that resulted in your suspension from the party.’ Harry went on to say that he will be ‘conducting interviews with witnesses’ and added: ‘I will also need a time when you are available for an interview.’ This last presumably as an afterthought: I suppose we need to hear from him. Anyway, at this interview (to be conducted in London, natch) I am allowed to bring along a ‘silent witness’ —someone who is not

I am far abroad at the moment but have just learnt the sad news from home of the death of George (Lord) Weidenfeld, at the age of 96. As a publisher, philanthropist, convener, guru and friend he was one of the most extraordinary people in 20th and 21st-century Britain. Born in Vienna in 1919, he fled the Nazis and came to the UK in the 1930s where he was housed and looked after by a Christian family. Throughout the extraordinary life and career that followed he constantly acted on the gratitude he felt towards the country and people that had taken him in. Only last year he set up a

One of the strangest and, in a weird way, best things to have happened to me in the past year was the emergence of a firm conviction among a quite large collection of internet weirdos that I spent my youth fighting for an elite unit of the Israeli army. It started after a boozy pre-Christmas lunch almost exactly a year ago, when a woman tweeted me. I vaguely recalled that she had tweeted me before, probably about Jews or bankers or Palestine or Dolphin Square or Jimmy Savile, all of which I get quite a lot and normally ignore. This time, though, she had a question. She wanted to know