Colonialism
It isn’t always easy to give money away
I always felt sorry for my father, then president of a chronically strapped educational institution, for having ceaselessly to approach…
The Spectator’s Notes
The National Trust has brought out its ‘Interim Report’, with the clumsy title ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic…
Hoping to find happiness: Paris Echo, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a serious novel must be in want of a theme. Paris Echo soon…
Playing it safe
BBC1’s latest Sunday-night drama The Last Post, about a British military base in Aden in 1965, feels like a programme…
Deluded continent
Les Blancs had a troubled birth. In 1965 several unfinished drafts of the play were entrusted by its dying author,…
The Spectator’s notes
Because, it says, of its ‘liberal values and respect for human dignity’, the Economist has put out a film about…
The greatest surprise about Nigeria on its centenary is that it exists at all
A giant was born in 1914, an African giant. The same year European powers set about each other in the…
These I have loved
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
Dirty white gold
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…
A fool’s paradise
A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a…
A dying language
Why I won’t let my children be taught French
