I am pictured here in the Al-Hamidiyah Souq in Damascus, with a shopkeeper called Bosra al-Cham. I wonder what has happened to him? I am helping to organsie a Streatham and Clapham United Nations Association event next Tuesday, at which we will find out more about the humanitarian situation faced by civillians, and raise funds […]
Peter Gabriel at work on ‘So’ in 1985, Ashcombe House near Bath.
I have written a short post for my friends at British Future about the Anglo-Irish, prompted by recent memorial event to celebrate the life of Dick Hutchins, a fascinating man.
France provides some of my happiest and most evocative memories of childhood. I remember when I was very small, sitting in a cafe in Dunkirk with my parents – when the waitress came over with our croissants, they made me thank her in broken French. I was glad to do so, though unfortunately my French […]
Four years ago we had a dinner in our Pimlico flat to celebrate President Obama’s inauguration. As I recall, we drank Buds. Unlike some, I am largely happy with the way has governed, as satisfied as a non-American is entitled to be. Regardless of the politics some fancied they could project on him, he has […]
I was sad to hear that William Rees Mogg has died. I enjoyed his writing on the corner of the West Country that he loved – his columns devoted to Somerset Country Cricket, to the North Somerset coalfields, to Downside Abbey. Rather too often (editors too must surely have been exasperated), he wrote about the […]
In our flat in south London I have an envelope filled with invitations sent to my great-grandparents. They lived for much of the early part of the twentieth century in what is now Ghana, but was then known as the Gold Coast, a British colony in west Africa. My great-grandfather was an accountant in the […]
