Diary

Diary

19 July 2014 9:00 am

I have written a play, but a month after it was sent to half a dozen theatres, I have heard…

Diary

12 July 2014 9:00 am

Can there be anything more perfect than early July in London, when the sun is shining, the sky a cloudless…

Diary

5 July 2014 9:00 am

The former proprietor of this magazine, Conrad Black, is in London at the moment with his gorgeous wife Barbara, and…

Diary

28 June 2014 9:00 am

I’m an old conference hand going back to the Tories’ annual get-together of 1958. My headmaster, an Irish Christian Brother…

Diary

21 June 2014 8:00 am

Could there be a more timely advert for the Better Together campaign than on the field of sport? What the…

Diary

14 June 2014 8:00 am

To Paris, for the launch of the French edition of my novel about the Dreyfus affair. As we land, I…

Diary

7 June 2014 9:00 am

I’ve been heading east in a circle around the world from Chicago, taking in New York, London, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol,…

Diary

31 May 2014 9:00 am

My trips to meet Russians in Russia these days are a little less controversial than my encounter with them in…

Diary

24 May 2014 9:00 am

Having dampened local republican ardour during their recent tour of New Zealand and Australia, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge…

Diary

17 May 2014 9:00 am

My wife and I spent the winter in Worcestershire. This allowed me to tell everyone back home in the States:…

Diary

10 May 2014 9:00 am

I feel an intense antipathy for Vladimir Putin. No one on the international scene has aroused in me such dislike…

Diary

3 May 2014 9:00 am

I am back in the UK for work. Great time to turn up — after the grim, grey grind of…

Diary

26 April 2014 9:00 am

Ahh! Spring has sprung at last! Or has it? Leaving a warm and sunlit London last month we expected balmy…

Diary

19 April 2014 9:00 am

A week away in Crete: I’ve come for the archaeology and culture — little patches of Minos, ancient Greece, Byzantium and…

Diary

12 April 2014 9:00 am

Sunday afternoon brings the bomb squad to South Kensington. From my third-floor window, I see them fan out through the…

Diary

5 April 2014 9:00 am

What a week! I was thrilled to have a chance to confront Nick Clegg but my excitement was tempered with…

Diary

29 March 2014 9:00 am

I had a slight shock last week, while listening to Desert Island Discs. The admirable nurse Dame Claire Bertschinger had…

Diary

22 March 2014 9:00 am

I have just shaved off my beard in preparation for a new series of Lewis because I want to look…

Diary

15 March 2014 9:00 am

The week leading up to publication is a strange time for any author. You subject yourself to doing everything from…

Diary

8 March 2014 9:00 am

Last October, in these very pages, I wrote with what is now annoying prescience, ‘Like almost everyone else in the…

Diary

1 March 2014 9:00 am

 São Paolo It was back in 2001 that my good friend Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs coined the acronym ‘Bric’,…

Diary

22 February 2014 9:00 am

My surgery has been calling in all those over 75 for a special session with their doctor — a sort…

Diary

15 February 2014 9:00 am

There’s no reason why you should have heard of me. No reason why you would have watched a Channel 4…

Diary

8 February 2014 9:00 am

As any author will tell you, literary festivals differ widely. If you are invited to Willy Dalrymple’s Jaipur Festival, with…

Diary

1 February 2014 9:00 am

When visiting Britain and Australia last November, I discovered that the mayor of Toronto, Robert Ford, is now the world’s…