I knew that the historian Sir Richard Evans was a rather abrasive and quarrelsome man, but I was staggered by his vicious attack on Michael Gove in the Guardian last week. Here’s Evans’s first sentence: ‘Gove presided over the disintegration of our school system; he opened up teaching to untrained people in state schools, because
Sport is like love: it can only really hurt you if you care. Or for that matter, bring joy. You can’t explain sport, any more than you can explain the Goldberg Variations: you either get it or you don’t. So it can be hard to justify a life spent among bats and balls and leaping
I have written a play, but a month after it was sent to half a dozen theatres, I have heard nothing. Either they’re being slow or they’re so shocked that they cannot bring themselves to respond. The play is called Dinner With Saddam and takes place in Baghdad on the evening of the Allied bombardment.
Can there be anything more perfect than early July in London, when the sun is shining, the sky a cloudless azure and the temperature hovers in the mid-seventies? Sorry, I still do Fahrenheit. It’s party time everywhere, with all the annual events happening, but I don’t do Ascot any more, too waggish, or Henley, too
The former proprietor of this magazine, Conrad Black, is in London at the moment with his gorgeous wife Barbara, and I’ve got very bad news for those of his enemies who predicted that he’d be a social pariah when he got out of jail. At lunches, parties and dinners I’ve attended this week in his
I’m an old conference hand going back to the Tories’ annual get-together of 1958. My headmaster, an Irish Christian Brother of firm nationalist sympathies, almost certainly felt that attendance was an occasion of sin. But he relented to the extent of allowing me to skip Saturday morning sports for the prime ministerial rally. Harold Macmillan
Could there be a more timely advert for the Better Together campaign than on the field of sport? What the England football team manifestly need is the man who is now the best British player, an offensive winger with the speed of a cheetah and the tactical brain of Rommel — proud Welshman, proud Brit,
To Paris, for the launch of the French edition of my novel about the Dreyfus affair. As we land, I isolate three anxieties out of my general sense of unease. First is the natural nervousness of any Englishman contemplating telling the French anything about their own country. Second is the French law which allows the
I’ve been heading east in a circle around the world from Chicago, taking in New York, London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol, Brighton, Paris, Geneva, Barcelona, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne and LA. Now I’m killing time in Barcelona. I’d forgotten what a wonderful town it is, and also reminded of how Mediterranean culture really is right at the
My trips to meet Russians in Russia these days are a little less controversial than my encounter with them in Corfu. The Corfu trip, though, did have the bonus of throwing me together with George Osborne, whom I had not known previously. Returning from St Petersburg I awoke on Saturday to his interview on the
Having dampened local republican ardour during their recent tour of New Zealand and Australia, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visit thinking-about-breaking-away Scotland next week. They’ll tour Glenturret Distillery near Crieff, Perthshire, next Thursday, to ‘bottle their own Glenturret whisky’, if you please. Sounds like a pro-union royal initiative, but what will First Minister Alex
My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States: ‘We are wintering in Worcestershire.’ This may be a sentence that has never actually been uttered in human history, even by people who spend all their winters in Worcestershire. It turned out to be a
I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike since Stalin died. Though not a mass killer on the Stalin scale, he has the same indifference to human life. There is a Stalinist streak of gangsterism too: his ‘loyalists’ wear masks as well as
I am back in the UK for work. Great time to turn up — after the grim, grey grind of the British winter. Here in Manchester, people stroll in shirtsleeves or T-shirts, though it’s still only 15 degrees. They are, in truth, dazzlingly white. Their semi-nudity strikes me as a tad premature, but then I’ve
Ahh! Spring has sprung at last! Or has it? Leaving a warm and sunlit London last month we expected balmy weather in Los Angeles but the skies were grey and murky and, like Lena Horne sang in ‘The Lady is a Tramp’: I hate California, it’s cold and it’s damp. It’s necessary to dress in
A week away in Crete: I’ve come for the archaeology and culture — little patches of Minos, ancient Greece, Byzantium and the Venetian Republic are scattered around this most southern sentinel of Europe. It hasn’t gone quite as I’d hoped; when it comes to monuments, the Greek rule seems to be ‘close early, close often’. But
Sunday afternoon brings the bomb squad to South Kensington. From my third-floor window, I see them fan out through the garden square, scrutinising leaf and bud, lamppost and compost bin. Drains are peered into, postboxes eyed suspiciously. Although Windsor Castle is 23 miles to the west, the Queen’s state banquet for the Irish President Michael
What a week! I was thrilled to have a chance to confront Nick Clegg but my excitement was tempered with disappointment that neither Cameron nor Miliband agreed to take part — although both were invited. I’d love to have challenged Miliband about the effects of uncontrolled immigration: wage compression, for instance, and the erosion of
I had a slight shock last week, while listening to Desert Island Discs. The admirable nurse Dame Claire Bertschinger had chosen a reading of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ as one of her eight discs. The poem, beautifully read by Michael Caine, was nearing its climax when it came to an abrupt stop. If you do this
I have just shaved off my beard in preparation for a new series of Lewis because I want to look my best for my on-screen love, Donald Whately. Donald? Isn’t his name Kevin? I’ll explain. A few years ago I was fishing off the end of a jetty in Florida. A large American gentleman approached
