Matthew Parris

Last week we broadcast my BBC radio Great Lives episode on Kenneth Williams. The effervescent comedian and presenter Tom Allen chose him. It was just enormous fun. You don’t, as a presenter, need talent to lead a programme on Williams: you just play archive clips and everybody falls about laughing. We certainly did. Funniest of

It was a luminous late August sunset, and we were in France, dining outdoors with some friends who have a magical, charming place in the countryside there. We were discussing audiobooks of the kind you could listen to on a long car journey and I mentioned how Julian, my partner, and I had enjoyed my

The best way (and with politicians sometimes the only way) to know whether people are aware they’ve made a mistake is seldom to put that question point-blank. A reflexive ‘oh no I didn’t’ kicks in. Do you honestly think, for example, that government ministers are privately confident that as Covid-19 swept the country, hospitals were

In 1846 Vienna, as across much of the world, a relatively new disease called puerperal (or ‘childbed’) fever had reached epidemic proportions in the local maternity hospital. Death rates of mothers and babies after childbirth were averaging 10 per cent, sometimes twice that. Across the western world millions were dying, the rate reaching 40 per

I couldn’t disagree more with Sir Keir Starmer (it was ‘completely wrong,’ ‘it shouldn’t have been done in that way’) or with Boris Johnson (‘if people wanted the removal of the statue there are democratic routes which can be followed’). No, there was something magnificent about the sight of the Bristol mob throwing into the

My partner, Julian, hovered at my shoulder on Friday as I tapped out my Times Saturday column (about travel quarantine). I’d slipped in a paragraph with my own thoughts about the transmission of Covid-19. ‘Cut the lot,’ he said. ‘You’re not an epidemiologist. Nobody’s interested in your theories.’ This was probably good advice so I

My research assistant, John Steele, is also a songwriter. A friend emailed him with the lyrics of a Fleetwood Mac number. These days Google often appends emails with a shortcut to save you typing your own answer by suggesting one or two likely responses. In the Fleetwood Mac lyric a former lover wonders whether her

Locked contentedly into the rhythms of farming life and digging for lead on its Derbyshire Peak District slopes, the village of Eyam lay blissfully unaware of what was about to hit it, and propel it into the history books for ever. The Viccars family, the Reverend William Mompesson and his family, Elizabeth Hancock and her

There must be a quote from Shakespeare for this, but so far I haven’t found it. It’s the way we all of us contrive to see in cosmic events the evidence, the signs and portents, for what we already believed even before the cataclysm had occurred. These are the days of miracle and wonder, sang

Something about the word ‘bomb’ has always thrilled me, and I know why. No school today. In the 1950s we lived in Nicosia, Cyprus, when the island was a British colony and Greek Cypriot terrorists were trying to kill us. Our house was near a big army camp and our Cypriot neighbours were friendly, so

A week of remembrance marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last month had me thinking hard about what we mean by Evil. ‘Evil’, that is, when used with a real or metaphorical capital letter. You cannot join discussion of the Holocaust without hearing the word again and again. And indeed, what other