It is odd to be knocked sideways by the death of someone who is 100 years old, and yet Ronnie Blythe’s departure last weekend has come as a shock. The friendship of Ronnie was compared by his friend a fellow-writer...
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Just now and then, life throws up a character who turns out to be a sort of Rorschach Test of public taste – someone who, like the famous inkblot, can prompt reactions which reveal deeper psychological truths. Usually these Rorschach...
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As the World Cup unfolds, we hear every day about how football spills into the wider world - into politics, into the way people think and feel. It's a symbol of something, we're told, or a metaphor for something else....
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The working life of a professional writer is not exciting. You write. You read what you have written. You sigh. You try again until, with luck, something passable appears on the page or screen before you. Now and then -...
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If writers and musicians have a token bird that symbolises what they do, it is not, however much they may like it to be, a nightingale, a skylark or a peacock. It's a magpie. We are all, while writing, scavenging...
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The words in this headline were emailed to me a few years back, shortly after the death of Bob Hope. At the time, I was writing a twice-weekly opinion column for the Independent, and I had devoted one of these...
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Predictably, inevitably, the great novelist Philip Roth is now receiving the full Updike treatment. He has become 'problematic'. His novels should 'recontextualised'. He is on the wrong side of Me Too. It has been a few years now since that...
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One revelation in last week's Oprah Winfrey interview with the Runaway Royals was so startling that even I, who doesn't give much of damn for any of them, was rather intrigued. It was claimed by Prince Harry that what is...
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A horrible, haunting murder has this week prompted the usual hand-wringing on news programmes and online. Why should women take responsibility for their own safety? Is there something intrinsically wrong with men? Or sentencing? Or the police? Or the press?...
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It was in January 1985 when with my son Xan, who was seven at the time, I first entered the Loftus Road Stadium in west London. Neither of us had been to a proper, professional football match before, but Xan...
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