Reading a recent hard-luck story about Sir Steve Redgrave and a group of young rowers from Liverpool, it was difficult to keep at bay the remark that once landed Boris Johnson in trouble the one about Liverpudlians having a tendency...
Read moreThey will soon be all over the newspapers, the bright young faces of 2008, those sparkling, talented people in their twenties who this time next year will, we are reliably informed, be household names. The photographs which appear in the...
Read moreHeartbreakingly, news of the ultimate gift of the moment has been announced just too late for the great present-giving orgy of the year. Jordan is planning to auction her breast implants on eBay. All proceeds of the sale will, naturally,...
Read moreAll the shop girls in Manchester were there. Reading this line in reports of the great Manchester United Christmas party, a man would have to be a very cold fish indeed not to experience a stab of envy, a twitch...
Read moreIt has been a week during which small but profoundly held beliefs have come into question. An ITN newsreader has been found sleeping rough in Brighton. That is not supposed to happen to newsreaders, least of all those who work...
Read moreA surprisingly effective, if old-fashioned, term of abuse is to call someone "a shit". Other insults are more forthright and rude but tend to be less precise in their meaning. A shit is sneaky, small-minded, unreliable, selfish and (for reasons...
Read moreShooting from the hip, as has been her habit down the years, Doris Lessing used her acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature as an opportunity to take a pop at the great evils of our time: the decline of...
Read moreAt the Aldeburgh Documentary Festival on Sunday, Anthony Wall, the producer and director who has been responsible for many of the BBC Arena documentaries over the past 30 years, advanced a rather daring moral argument. The behaviour of society as...
Read moreFor as long as politics and cynicism have co-existed, the excuse of the apathetic non-voter has remained unchanged. Politicians? They're all the same, aren't they? Almost always, the line is demonstrably false, but in one area at least it is...
Read moreA couple of small but thrilling items of local news might be included in the papers of Hilary Benn when he travels to Bali next week for the United Nations' great climate change conference. Ipswich Borough Council has announced that...
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