There are few professions quite as innately snobbish as publishing. In the world of books, two areas of potential snootiness, the commercial and the literary, combine to create a feudal hierarchy of brutal divisiveness. The system flourishes from generation...
Read moreHere is an idea for one of the country's many courses in creative writing or broadcasting. To illustrate the terrible, corrupting effect of cliquishness and publicity on talent, students would be asked to analyse the careers and cuttings of a...
Read moreOn Radio Two’s Jeremy Vine Show today, there was, according to the Eastern Daily Press online report, a “heated debate” about Tesco, whose plan to bring a store to the centre of Sheringham was being discussed this morning by North...
Read moreA rare moment of prescience. In Friday’s Independent, I released a brief but heartfelt cry of anguish about the narcissistic doings of Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Anna Ford, Clive James and any other ageing literati who belonged to an informal...
Read moreIt has been a hot, exciting month for those who get a thrill out of sex and punishment – that is, it seems, much of the British public and almost all of its media. There may have been natural disasters,...
Read moreThe beautiful and ever-surprising cit of Norwich has always been good for a joke for the rest of the country. When a council behaves with lunatic officiousness – banning conkers or declaring hanging flower-baskets a health hazard – the story...
Read moreHow the audience laughed at Islington's King's Head Theatre on Monday when, as part of an evening of politically incorrect music called Taboo-Be-Do!, the singer Victoria Hart delivered a heart-tugging little number from 1928 in praise of a woman's domestic...
Read moreAs the world gets progressively madder, it seems only right and proper that psychiatry is forever updating its list of hang-ups available to us all. This week, with the excitement of a fashion designer launching a new spring collection, American...
Read moreWhat excitement there was when Any Questions came to town. Members of the great Radio 4 tribe emerged from the Norfolk and Suffolk countryside - a querulous, bloody-minded, easily affronted cross section of the mature middle-class for whom the end...
Read moreSometimes politics writes its own jokes. This week's news, for example, that Pauline Hanson, who built her political career in Australia on a virulent anti-immigration policy, is herself to migrate to England would seem to belong to the world of...
Read more
