Category Archives: Travel notes

or anything, because I am sure that at this time of year their workplaces are full of lively gossip from long before sunrise till deep into the night, but the Telegraph reports (via AFP, via Ilta Sanomat) that a 60-year-old … Continue reading → Continue reading →

Dagens Nyheter reports that an elk has done a runner from a restaurant in the centre Kungsbacka, a small town south of Göteborg. The monarch of the forest had broken in — at lunchtime — thorugh a plate glass window. … Continue reading → Continue reading →

From the Telegraph’s obituary of a distinguished spook, who spent most of the war as a PoW, before joining MI5. “Simkins endured no great hardship as a prisoner, regarding camp life as relatively easy after the privations of Marlborough .” Continue reading →

The christmas present I would like to give my mother is a ride in a Tiger Moth from Duxford aerodrome. Her brother Tony was a Spitfire pilot, and she herself was taken up in a biplane in Calcutta in 1934, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

The reason I’m in New York is to profile Bob Silvers, who was one of the founders and is still one of the editors of the New York Review of Books. Yesterday I was talking to his cofounder, and co-editor, … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I have been running around like crazy for the last few weeks, and will continue doing so. If there are any readers resident in NYC who’d like to meet, I’m there in the latter half of next week. Also, I … Continue reading → Continue reading →

One of the most valuable things that I erm backed up when I left the Independent was a CD of the DNB running up to about 1995. I always use it for researching the ancestors of my profile subjects. I … Continue reading → Continue reading →

My friend’s wife is dying. She has been headed undeviatingly to this end, to this room of her own at the far end of the neurological ward on the seventh floor, for fifteen years at least, ever since she started … Continue reading → Continue reading →

This is a phrase that I needed translating into English. It comes in The Mask of Zorro, a deeply crappy film that my daughter and her friend found on video in a Swedish B&B. They just loved it, and claimed … Continue reading → Continue reading →

I’m meant to be writing something deadly funny about the Swedish euro referendum today, but got distracted by the front page of the tabloid Expressen, which had a bizarre story of domestic violence I had never come across before. Continue reading →