When I first started writing songs, about ten years ago, I took them around to folk clubs. One, I discovered too late, took a hard-line, faintly Stalinist, approach to any music that did not belong to what is reverently described...
When I'm feeling disheartened by the fiction I've been reading (it happens), I reach for something by Philip Roth. He never lets me down. It's not that his books are all masterpieces of the order of Sabbath's Theater or The...
It was when the Independent lost its best columnist Christina Patterson that I knew I no longer felt at home at the paper. By 'lost', I mean 'fired'. Christina had been there for ten years and at the time was...
The question was where to play Will Self. He would be a dominant presence in central defence, of course, but what we needed was a goal-scorer. As player-manager, I saw him in the role of the traditional centre-forward - a...
Like many placid, slightly dull people, I have often been secretly jealous of those whose dramatic car-crash lives is the subject of endless concern and interest among their friends. It has taken until now for me to come out of...
This is the happy day when a new UK edition of my book Boy2Girl is published by Andersen Press. It is probably the story that gave me most fun when I was writing it. It was written at a time...
I wrote 'My Village' one autumn a few years back. It was, I think, provoked by the idea that the great city-dwelling majority of the population were given a distorted view of life in the country - one that was...
The news that JP Donleavy - author, playwright, litigant and squire - died earlier this week has reminded me of one of the more peculiar meetings I had while researching a biography of our mutual friend Willie Donaldson in 2006....
Soon after the death of Fidel Castro, I pointed out somewhere online that, for all its brave resistance to the crude might of the United States, the Cuban regime did have the unpleasant habit of locking up those who disagreed...
It was, even by the standards of the British royal family, an extraordinary revelation. The Duke of Edinburgh, according to a report by the veteran court correspondent Talbot Church, had been causing more concern than usual in royal circles with...