It’s a rare journalist or writer these days who doesn’t use a computer. It’s a rarer one still who doesn’t find himself or herself saying, “Why can’t the people who make programs that we have to use take some account of the way we work?” Well, some of them do. For my last two books, [...]

To the English-Speaking Union last night, after a day in which Peter Mandelson’s score-settling memoirs had been causing ructions in the Labour Party. The occasion was an evening dedicated to Mark Twain, to mark the release of his unexpurgated autobiography and its serialisation in Granta. The Canadian actor Kerry Shale, doing the readings, was thoroughly [...]

A week ago, asked by an editor to provide some background details about myself, I said that I had grown up in Northern Ireland and still loved it, because its geography had always been prettier than its politics. I had been thinking lately that even the politics weren’t as ugly as they used to be [...]

At a workshop organised earlier this week by the Latin American Travel Association, my journalist colleagues and I were asked by a tour operator whether we thought he needed to hire a PR firm or could make a stab at doing the job himself.
We all advised him to have a go. After all, he was [...]