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.
Posted on 19th October 2010.
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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?
Posted on 27th September 2010.
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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.
Posted on 16th September 2010.
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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.
Posted on 31st August 2010.
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There's always been something compelling about Princess Anne. It is the combination of shocking rudeness – especially to the public when they are proffering gifts, the time-warp fashions and seventies bouffant, and the below-stairs new husband who now seems to be entirely hidden away.
Posted on 14th August 2010.
I haven't managed to add a links page to this site, but there's a few fantastic blogs that I'd to add. Ok, so these people are all friends, but I think you'll find their sites as addictive as I do.
Posted on 27th July 2010.
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Everybody sing Ee-Oo," orders the clean-cut singer at the front of the vast auditorium. Ten thousand Californian voices sing back in a stadium rock call and response. A reptilian rock veteran, who looks like he's been out too long in the West Coast Sun, crunches out a bed of power-chords on his Gibson Les Paul. A familiar chord progression - borrowed somewhere from the back catalogue of eighties soft rock – begins. Ecstatically, the singer launches into a Rock anthem that, for once, is true to its name: "If you're alive and you've been redeemed, rise and sing, rise and sing".
Tagged: New Statesman
Posted on 27th July 2010.
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It is not quite as painful as the sub-zero Peak District training runs of his youth, but tonight Sebastian Coe is learning about a new kind of physical discomfort.
Tagged: Interviews for the Financial Times , Financial Times Reportage
Posted on 24th May 2010.
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Every March, American students leave their university campuses and head off for Spring Break – a weeklong recess that marks the unofficial end of winter
Tagged: Financial Times Reportage
Posted on 3rd May 2010.
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I'm just back from a frentic trip from Shining Sea to Shining Sea - dipping my toe in the Pacific and the Atlantic and exposed my whey pallor to some gorgeous Floridian and Californian sunshine. My insane travel schedule meant that had lots of time as I looked at nothingness/shack/nothingness/chapel/nothingness/boiled peanut stand to ruminate on cultural differences between Britain and America. I made a mental note of all the things that, despite globalisation, we have yet to import from Stateside.
Posted on 21st March 2010.
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And so for the first film experience of the New Year I trudged through the arctic waste to the Barbican centre - passed those strange hothouses full of South American greenery – to a half-empty but incredibly comfortable cinema to see "Nowhere Boy".
Posted on 5th January 2010.
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In the late summer sunshine in a bucolic church of St James in Sutton Cheney, right in the centre of England, the Richard III society are saying prayers for their King. It's the 22nd August, the five hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth, the denouement of the War of the Roses, when Richard lost his crown on Bosworth field.
Posted on 2nd January 2010.
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Rob Blackhurst