High passions and occasional dottiness are never far away when public libraries are under discussion. Earlier in the year, I wrote a light-hearted blog which induced an attack of the vapours in Ed Vaizey, the shadow Culture Secretary. Vaizey is...
Read moreThumping his chest, a silverback of the London Zoo management has announced that, after the premature deaths of two male lowland gorillas, another is to be imported. "Without a doubt, seeing a gorilla will rank as one of the most...
Read moreAs from this week, the word "shame" is likely to be appearing with increased regularity in the national newspapers. The Premier League football season starts on Saturday, and the national team will be in action on Wednesday. Already the predictable...
Read moreNow and then, about once a year, the stage of public life darkens as a leading player makes his entrance. Sir Jonathan Miller is about to make a pronouncement about the cultural state of the nation. The news is rarely...
Read moreIt is the ultimate hippie nightmare. The Grateful Dead, a band which for 30 years represented the cause of love, peace and LSD, is about to provide marketing lessons for 2010. Their fans, who liked to be known as Deadheads,...
Read moreEven coming from the weird and wacked-out world of Tinseltown, the news that Sean Penn is to appear in a Hollywood biopic of Maxwell Perkins is somewhat startling. Perkins was a mild, courteous, self-effacing publisher’s editor. He was, admittedly, such...
Read moreAnyone looking for a happy, escapist view of recession and unemployment should skip along to the Vaudeville Theatre in London where a revival of Neil Simon's 1971 play The Prisoner of Second Avenue has just opened. The storyline may be...
Read moreHere's a song I wrote recently for the brilliant Victoria Hart, called 'It's Only Love That Gets Me', receiving its world premiere last weekend. The recorded version can be heard on the Something Happened MySpace page.
Read moreA few days ago, I rang a friend whose recent emails had suggested that he was in low spirits. There had been health problems, a career disappointment. After a couple of minutes of small talk, he asked politely: "To what...
Read moreThe dog was barking. It was an unusual bark - simultaneously excited and frustrated, different in timbre from her usual head-down-a-rabbit-hole bark, or her trying-to-climb-a-tree-after-a-squirrel bark, or her I’m-the-queen-of-the-castle guard-dog bark. I investigated. She was dancing like a demented show-pony...
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