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 [...]

Music to lift the tone of an election campaign? Laura Barton, in her Hail, Hail, Rock’n’Roll column in The Guardian yesterday, suggested Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding (with music by Clive Langer and lyrics by Elvis Costello). I’d add Sam Cooke’s contribution to the Civil Rights struggle, which itself [...]

When I visit a country for the first time and like it, I expect to be able to encourage other people to visit it. Burma presents a trickier problem. There are those who argue that the country’s military government is so repressive that we should not go there at all. Others, heard perhaps less often, [...]

The neatest phrasemaking of the week came last night on Channel 4 news from Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, commenting on the difficulties facing Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister, he said, is now reduced to the Travolta-Micawber Formula: staying alive in the hope that something will turn up. And Finkelstein had the generosity to acknowledge [...]