Features
Morocco: A match made in heaven
I’m sitting by the pool in a lush Moroccan garden playing chess with Nigel Short, and I feel like an…
Populism vs post-democracy
Europeans are usually alarmed or sniffy about American concern for democracy’s fate, but this time liberal opinion on both sides…
Europe’s year of insurgency
After the tumult of 2016, Europe could do with a year of calm. It won’t get one. Elections are to…
Positively Trumpian
This being the time of year for it, you’re probably thinking what form your New Year New You will take.…
Switzerland: What makes Geneva tick
In a quiet backstreet in Geneva, a few blocks from the lakeside, there is a museum which will change the…
Looking homeward
Batavia, New York The presidential campaign just ended was mercifully lacking in the ghostwritten platitudes with which Franklin D. Roosevelt,…
The real Brexit risk
At the Westfield shopping centre in east London, the queues started at 2 a.m. on Christmas night. In Wrexham, people started…
A different class of snob
‘Ah, beware of snobbery,’ said Cary Grant, who was surprisingly often the smartest guy in the room. ‘It is the unwelcome recognition…
Italy: I’ve got Rome on repeat
My year was topped and tailed with trips to Rome. In March, as the blossom unfurled along the Tiber and…
How to beat terrorism
Until a few years ago, Pakistan was one of the most dangerous countries on earth. The tribal areas in the…
Sweden: Multiple thrills, minimal risk
All too often in life there’s a gap between expectation and reality. Not with driving on ice. The expectation is…
Seaham Hall
I’m standing in milady’s boudoir, a room which would have delighted Liberace. Here, nothing is de trop and everything is…
Hangovers
Although drinking excessive levels of alcohol is up there with Olympic cycling and democracy as things the British excel at,…
Wildlife Notebook
The morning is cold and dark but the orchard is thronged with birds. Moorhens dash from one side to the…
A radical mistake
In the early 1990s, after the shock of the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, I began to do some research…
Traveller’s Notebook
I was drinking in the bar of Manhattan’s Nomad Hotel when in snuck The Most Seen Human Ever To Have…
Notebook
One remark from the Christmas party season knocks insistently around my head. It came from Nigel Farage on a staircase…
Season’s beatings
My colleagues at the commercial and chancery bar are all at their chalets in Gstaad, funded by the endless fees…
‘I get so frustrated with Whitehall’
The Prime Minister’s office is a small, unimpressive room in 10 Downing Street with miserable views and unexceptional furniture. Since…
Unforgiven
Now that almost six months have passed since the EU referendum, might it be time for old enemies to find…
The Netflix revolution
There have been two revolutions in television during my lifetime. The first happened in 1975 when Sony launched its Betamax…
The invention of Santa
Santa Claus ate Father Christmas. It happened quite suddenly. Well, it took about a decade, but that’s suddenly in cultural…
Notebook
One thing I won’t miss about No. 11 Downing Street are the Christmas cards: 2,056 Christmas cards to be exact. That…
From goth to Chancellor
If only I’d known. If only I’d foreseen that the teenage classmate who strode through our school gates every morning,…
Brexit’s breaking points
Trying to write the first draft of history on the EU referendum and the leader-ship mess that followed had both…
