Assume good behaviour and the bad can be eradicated It is not difficult to find symptoms in everyday life of our low self-esteem as a nation. Binge-drinking is one, casual violence another. But the most obvious and universal sign of...
Read moreIt has been a good few weeks for Max Clifford, Britain's new face of morality. With the quiet, caring authority of a bishop, he has presided over the difficult case of Alfie, the 13-year-old boy who may or may not...
Read moreProving that life can sometimes come up with punchlines with which no satirists could compete, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook have both been in the news this week. Moore, who died in 2002, is being remembered by his rather odd-sounding...
Read moreIt is a wonderful joke. It is folk art, like maypoles and cheese-rolling. It is a celebration of our history. It fuses the art of Magritte with that of the great 18th century painter George Stubbs. It is a patriotic...
Read moreWhile an increasingly futile debate surrounding the relative offensiveness of Carol Thatcher, Jo Brand, gollywogs and Jeremy Clarkson has rumbled on, the BBC has unfussily been showing how good public broadcasting can be on its fourth channel. Following the excellently...
Read moreIt must be something of a nightmare for a well-known public figure – Stephen Fry, say – to be trapped in a lift with five other people, and then to find his discomfort broadcast minute by minute to thousands of...
Read moreOne would think, in these money-obsessed times, that there would be a more consistent attitude to financial greed and its relationship to morality and happiness. Instead, a weird double- standard has taken hold. Bankers, it is agreed, have been foolish...
Read moreJohn Updike once wrote that a person's collection of books comes to symbolise the contents of his mind. "Books preserve, daintily, the redolence of their first reading – this beach, that apartment, that attack of croup. This flight to Indonesia."...
Read moreIt has already been a year of surprises, not all of them unpleasant. A world leader has dared to tell his people that it is time for them to grow up. Bankers have suddenly developed an interest in socialism. The...
Read moreWhat, at the end of one of the most momentous weeks in modern history, will dominate the news this weekend? The progress of the first black president of the United States? The meltdown in our banking system? Almost certainly both...
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