To walk out of a public performance before the end – be it the theater, a concert or a lecture – is not the done thing. It’s considered an antisocial act that disrupts the performance and thus other people’s pleasure. To walk out provokes tuts of disapproval and scowls of indignation. And yet while it’s
Table talk in London these days is so relentlessly gloomy that we need some irreverent juvenile banter to lighten things up
I may be thirty-six on the inside, but on the outside I definitely look seventy
Everyone has at least one friend that none of their other friends can stand, someone you love but everyone else loathes
The secret to working a room is to know when you’re in a room that can’t be worked
The tribes have a lot in common
I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately because I recently turned seventy and was considering throwing a big birthday party
There are writers and journalists who get public recognition all the time. Alas, I’m not one
I meant to experience Beauty. Wonder. Awe and all that jouissance jazz. Instead I’m thinking: help!
London literary life in the late 1970s to the late 1980s looks from today like a lost golden age
I could treat the whole thing with bemused Tom Wolfe snarkiness — or keep an open mind and get with the program
Ours is an age that prefers the battle of ideas and opinions rather than pleasure of discovering the mysteries of another person
It’s not a conscious or cruel dumping — it’s the dump of indifference
Even an old grump like me has been having a good time
S&M people might look like perverted children of the Sixties. But for all their weird ways this crowd is the natural ally of conservatives
What’s happening on the London fashion front?
For all my bohemian pretensions, I’m just an old-fashioned bourgeois boy at heart
Cleverness is overrated
Jordan Peterson would be appalled by a man like me — sixty-eight going on sixteen
Writers aren’t fun — they’re miserable egotists and that’s why we write
