Mary Dejevsky is a writer, broadcaster, and former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington.
You would be hard put to find a doughtier defender of British consumerdom than me. I don’t flinch from returning things that don’t work or don’t fit. I have successfully challenged supermarket bills as well as a fine for driving down a poorly signposted low traffic neighbourhood. So I’m no shrinking violet when it comes
Whatever the fate of the ceasefire and hostage exchange between Israel and Hamas, the latest conflict in the Middle East is reverberating far beyond the region. Recent weeks have seen hundreds of thousands of people march through European and American cities in support of either side. Flag-waving protesters were out in London again this weekend:
Nearly 20 years may have passed, but a good number of people will still recall the exchange between a salt-of-the-earth member of the public, Diana Church, and the then-prime minister, Tony Blair. The year was 2005, the occasion a pre-election edition of BBC Question Time, and the issue at hand? Well, plus ça change –
You won’t find me mounting the barricades in defence of the winter fuel payment, though I’ll miss the pleasant surprise when it landed in my bank account sometime before Christmas. I do, though, have a bit of a bone to pick with those well-heeled and often still lucratively-employed pensioners who dusted off their metaphorical loud-hailers
Is Lord Mandelson being ‘lined up’ as the UK’s next ambassador in Washington? The news that the Labour party’s arch-Blairite and one-time spin-doctor extraordinaire may be in the running for what is seen as the UK’s top diplomatic job has generated an immediate and impassioned reaction, much of it hostile. Some of this is because Mandelson is viewed as
Urban speed limits of 20mph and the traps for unwary drivers known as Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) really shouldn’t be elevated to the level of national politics. It may be an exaggeration to describe all politics as local, but such small-scale traffic edicts certainly are, and not just because central government has a myriad of
I belong to a generation of foreign correspondents whose first move, on entering a hotel room, was not to turn down the bed or to check (hopefully) for hot water, but to examine the phone, screwdriver in hand. Could you detach it from its socket? Could you open it up to get at the wiring?
Stella Assange’s elation was palpable, after what she has described as a whirlwind 72 hours. She was speaking to the BBC in Australia, where she was waiting to be reunited with her husband, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had just been freed from prison in the UK under a three-way deal between the UK, the
When Rishi Sunak proposed national service for 18-year-olds as the first big idea of his election campaign, my initial thought was: absolutely, bring it on. But then I had a second thought, which was that if Sunak was trying to boost the Conservative vote, rather than the nation’s preparedness, his big idea probably wasn’t going
Doesn’t it sound wonderful? The police are eyeing a device that could immobilise electric bikes and electric scooters in a split second by zapping them with pulses fired from special backpacks. The prospect conjures up an image of righteous ‘ghostbusters’ – as per the 1980s sci-fi film – able to stop the new breed of motorised troublemakers in
If you have been to the cinema recently and arrived in time for the adverts, you may already know what I am talking about. Somewhere between promotions for mega-burgers in glorious technicolour and exotic holiday destinations, you are plunged into what seems an endless, but is actually only a two-minute, horror flick, entitled ‘Sicker than
In the dog days of 2021, I spent a grey Sunday afternoon driving around a part of London with a view to an eventual flat move. Why take the car? Because the bus routes didn’t match where I planned to go, I wanted to stay over ground, and I would be able to cover more
What could be the final act in the long-running drama of Julian Assange’s legal battles has opened at the High Court in London. The two-day hearing is considering the Wikileaks founder’s appeal for a review of his extradition to the United States, which was given the go-ahead two years ago and approved by the then-Home
Heavier cars will soon be hit with higher parking fees. Good. As an urban pedestrian and a car driver, I have two groups of enemies. The first are dark-clad cyclists and scooterists who weave invisibly around other traffic as they ignore their own expensively-made lanes. The other are the drivers of so-called sports utility vehicles
You can change practically anything about yourself these days, from your appearance through to your gender. But one thing remains practically immutable: your birthday. And here some of us are markedly less fortunate than others, as those of us who made our entry into the world in early January well know. Having a birthday at this
Esther Rantzen’s decision to join the campaign to legalise assisted dying, in the light of uncertainty about her cancer prognosis, has rekindled and broadened a debate that has been simmering for many years. Talking on the latest BBC Today podcast, Rantzen disclosed that she had recently joined Dignitas, the Swiss organisation that helps people who are terminally
Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, this wasn’t – at least not yet – and it probably passed much of the country by, especially given the rival distractions of recent weeks. It was nonetheless a lawsuit that will have been followed in compulsive detail by at least two groups of people: those who own their own flats –
Earlier this year, I wrote, out of a mixture of bewilderment and frustration, about my experience as a novice in-patient at what is widely regarded as one of London’s premier teaching hospitals. I had been admitted with a badly broken ankle, and the result was three stays of just a few days each over the course
The BBC has launched what it is calling an ‘urgent investigation’ into six journalists and a freelancer working for its Arabic-language service over accusations they had shown anti-Israel bias in their coverage and expressed support on social media for Hamas. They were said to have called the attacks that killed more than 1,400 Israelis ‘a
It shames me to admit this, but I haven’t been near a public swimming pool for many a year. Hotel pools, yes; the sea – occasionally, in parts of the world with predictable warmth. But I have resisted the new wave of ‘wild’ swimming and was never a regular – to be honest even an
