Manchester
Diary
Scientists are experimenting with growing replacement vocal cords in the lab, as well as transplanting them from dogs. That was…
Spittle is the only thing Labour has left
I have started salivating excessively at night. I wake each morning in a pillowed swamp of my own effluvium, a…
Manchester has marvellous wines, and it’s not finished yet
It will seem an ungrateful comment after the lunch which I am about to describe, but Manchester has some way…
Can the new Northern Powerhouse supremo make Leeds and Manchester work together?
A doff of my flat cap to Jim O’Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who has been made a peer,…
Northern exposure
George Osborne on his love affair with Greater Manchester, and his party’s need for ‘a bit of the Heseltine’
Devolution vs democracy
Imagine if, in one of her first acts as First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon announced that, in spite of…
Psycho thriller
I had a fair idea of what I was in for when I went to see The Fall at Brixton’s…
Husband and wives
Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the…
Wild life
England We dropped off our daughter Eve at her new school in the Midlands and started the long journey…
Question time
‘Fingers on buzzers!’ says Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But technically this is inaccurate. Only one of the teams actually…
Diary
I am back in the UK for work. Great time to turn up — after the grim, grey grind of…
This charmless man
The sad end of the Morrissey myth
‘I shall surely sing’
A few weeks ago, I was wandering with a friend around West London when our conversation turned to the reliable…
High Speed 2’s no-fly zone
From Edinburgh airport there are more than 45 flights a day to London. And, I imagine, the same number back.…
