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Rod Liddle is infuriated by a church leader who refuses to confront the inhumanity perpetrated in the name of Islam or the consequences — visible in Malaysia — of legal apartheid I assume it is simply Dr Rowan Williams’s impressive beard which has persuaded everybody that he is an ‘intellectual’; certainly, it cannot be anything he has ever said or written. His latest contribution to the national reservoir of stupidity was the business about sharia law, of course. It was both inevitable and indeed desirable that the state would, somehow, devolve to our Muslim communities jurisdiction over certain — largely domestic — disputes, he opined. Cue a justifiable outrage.

He is sending back a bottle of 1965 Croft because it ‘doesn’t taste right’. I know that the odds of it tasting identical to the bottle we just drank in Pétrus are slim to none even if we were sober. He is miffed at the lack of label and they bring back the cork. I exchange an exasperated look with the sommelier, who woefully nods at yet another example of an Essex wide-boy embarrassing himself, and quietly brings another bottle. Our clients, traders visiting from Germany, continue to puff on their cigars. The Essex boy is not a breed that most public-school girls from Devon often encounter.

This was it: as soon as I stepped through the door of the offices of Khaled Mishal I held out my flimsy plastic folder and jabbered away in English to the four slick-suited men who were my reception committee, trying desperately to make clear that, yes, there was a potentially lethal weapon in there. I smiled and pointed sheepishly to the scissors, and they were confiscated before my cameraman and I were allowed to pass through the airport-style security portal. It was hardly surprising we were tense: it was the autumn of last year and we were making a film about Hamas for Channel 4. Khaled Mishal, the unofficial leader of Hamas, was in some ways a dangerous man to be talking to.

In a soulless, drafty rehearsal hall just around the corner from Euston Station, Roy Dotrice is doing a reading as John Aubrey under the watchful eye of the director Patrick Garland. The bitchy 17th-century writer and antiquarian is a character that both men have come to know very well over years. The relationship began in 1967 when Brief Lives — Garland’s adaptation of The Memoirs, Miscellanies, Letters and Jottings of John Aubrey — was first staged at the Hampstead Theatre. On the West End, Broadway and around the world, Dotrice went on to play Aubrey for more than 1,700 performances which still warrants a mention in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-running one-man show.