A shorter version of this piece appeared in FT Weekend on August 13th 2011
The vast parking lots are filling early at the Saddleback church car park on a Sunday in mid-July. Lines of new SUVs queue for the best parking spots, guided by theme-park style marshals. The occupants, mostly young families, spill happily out into the boundless Californian sunshine. Sunday best here means cargo shorts, chunky athletic sandals and surfer dude T-shirts.
More on Mass Appeal: An interview with Rick Warren - America's Pastorpreneur…
Tagged: Interviews for the Financial Times
Posted on 12th August 2011.
The Daily Telegraph Magazine
The Pallasades shopping centre in central Birmingham has seen better days. On a Wednesday morning there is barely any passing footfall amid its 1980s-style fuchsia-pink signs. Even the discount stores are deadly quiet, sitting cheek-by-jowl next to the blacked-out windows and final reduction signs. The bleakness of these overlit walkways finds an echo in the local economic statistics. Recession has bitten here harder than anywhere else in Britain, with 13 per cent of the population out of work – almost the same grim level as in the north-east of England.
More on Call of Duty: The Army's New Recruits…
Posted on 21st April 2011.
In the opening scene of the Iron Lady, a long retired Margaret gives her minders the slip and shuffles off to the corner shop to buy a pint of milk. Hunched in a regulation pensioner overcoat and headscarf, she dips an arthritic hand in her purse and pulls out her money with lumbering concentration, as if all is alien.
More on The Iron (ing) Lady …
Posted on 21st January 2011.
Take a Kindle out on the tube these days and you are liable to make friends. It could be the lateness of the hours I've been travelling, or perhaps I've been enveloped in a fug of festive bonhomie. But over the last month, wherever I've been, I've been accosted by strangers wanting to play with my Kindle. I haven't felt as popular since Father Christmas brought me that clunky yellow BMX Biker videogame in 1985.
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Posted on 5th January 2011.
After twelve months and six hundred pages, I've finally reached the end of Wolf Hall Hillary Mantel's marvellous epic based around the life of Thomas Cromwell.
More on To Play The King…
Posted on 2nd January 2011.
Amid weak sunshine in a low Norman church, right in the centre of England, the Richard III society are saying prayers for their King.
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Posted on 2nd January 2011.
And so to dinner last night in Covent Garden with my publisher friend Andreas. He came bearing a copy of Andy McSmith's new book "There's no such thing as Society", a history of the 1980s that we'd jointly conceived a couple of years back when I worked with him at Constable Robinson publishers.
More on Margaret and the flux capacitor …
Posted on 19th October 2010.
Watching Ed Miliband on Andrew Marr's sofa this morning felt somehow poignant. He's still a young and good-looking forty, light of manner, and amiable. What will years of the grinding exhaustion and unremitting pressures of leading the party do to him?
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Posted on 27th September 2010.
My faith had been shaken in the cult of Mac had been shaken by my original I-phone. Its spitfire curves were beautiful and the touch-screen functionality stunning. but, however beautiful the 3G maps and clever little touches like the gradual fade-down in volume on a track when an incoming call comes, or the easy-to-use visual voicemail. The problem I had was a daily battle to decide whether these dream-world futuristic gizmos were worth the more prosaic fact that it was the world's worst phone.
More on An I-Phone That Works …
Posted on 16th September 2010.
In 1935, Allen Lane, Managing Editor of Bodley Head publishers, was having a bad time in the office. His company on the brink of bankruptcy due to some ruinous publishing decisions – and he was looking for a scheme that would restore its fortunes.
More on The Day That Penguins First Flew …
Posted on 31st August 2010.
Rob Blackhurst