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• New Statesman (3)

  • New Statesman, February 2017

    In April 2004, in Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest of America, I found myself on an unexpected literary pilgrimage. I was on a book tour which left little time for sightseeing, and had arrived in Seattle on a Sunday, expecting to spend the Monday mainly signing books across town…
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  • New Statesman, July 2016

    Until the 2012 Olympics, I didn’t realise that the schedule for every Games is roughly the same: all the swimming in the first week; athletics in the second; the climax of the rowing on the middle Saturday. London was the only Olympics I covered in person as a sportswriter, and…
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  • New Statesman, February 2016

    For this story, I intend to take you back 25 years, to the days when no one in the world had email. It’s quite important that you can picture the primitive scene: we are in the dusty and characterless offices of a small-circulation weekly magazine, staffed by care-worn editors and…
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• Saga (6)

  • Saga, September 2016

    I don’t know whether you’ve seen the Danish family TV saga The Legacy, but I can tell you that a) it’s very good, b) it’s extremely well acted, and c) I would happily screen the first season of it for you if my copy hadn’t, bafflingly, disappeared. I have searched…
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  • Saga, June 2016

    A friend at my art class asked the other day, “What do you do with your pictures afterwards?” This is a very good question to ask someone who is learning to draw and paint portraits, and making little observable progress. When you are a beginner like me, what is the…
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  • Saga, February 2016

    As I write this, I have just returned from Manchester to London, and have deposited a small piece of luggage in the hall. This piece of luggage contains what we shall call my “Manchester requirements” and I know I should have unpacked it at once, but I have merely ransacked…
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  • Saga, September 2015

    By and large, when I am invited to things, I don’t go. There was a time when I would agonise over the decision for a week or two, but now I don’t waste the emotional energy. I go ahead and lie. “Damn, I can’t come,” I say in my RSVP….
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  • Saga, April 2014

    As I write this, there are men in my garden. They are constructing a new patio area, having already erected a fence. And I will miss them when they go. Previously in my life I have left workmen to get on with jobs, thinking that it was rude to stay…
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  • Saga, May 2013

    Recently, when I was in America, there was a rather good story on the news. A woman identified by the media as “the cell-phone bandit” was holding up banks. She had acquired the name through her interesting modus operandi, which was to enter the bank with her mobile phone clamped…
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• Sunday Telegraph (6)

  • Sunday Telegraph, October 2014

    Surprisingly, there are down sides to taking a holiday to a warm Greek island in the month of October. The main one is that you return to your UK abode and find it all grey and mournful and joyless – up to its knees in fallen leaves, needing the lights…
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  • Sunday Telegraph, August 2014

    A few years ago, a kindly film producer took an interest in one of my novels – a novel that was set on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s. He suggested a visit to key locations on the island, and invited both the appointed screenwriter and the appointed director….
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  • Sunday Telegraph, May 2014

    I get the weird impression that I’m the only person watching BBC2’s The Big Allotment Challenge. It’s been going for three weeks now, and I keep mentioning it to people, but they always look vaguely in another direction and change the subject to how no one could hear a word…
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  • Sunday Telegraph, October 2013

    I met a kindly dental hygienist the other day, and I can’t tell you how much I always assumed that “kindly dental hygienist” was an oxymoron. This lovely woman did not scold; she seemed to take no judgmental position of any kind; astonishingly, she didn’t even exclaim, “This is the …
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  • Sunday Telegraph, March 2013

    My mum had a problem with her lavatory cistern last week. “Ballcock?” I said. “Probably,” she replied. Evidently, there was a bit of an overflow issue, which has now been put right by a professional, but it was a struggle for me not to jump in the car and go…
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  • Sunday Telegraph, January 2013

    So here we are in yet another new year, and I have an especially trivial linguistic point to make. I feel it is time to take note of a lamentable development in written English, which I have decided to blame (mostly) on our effing word processing software, because that’s the…
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