Occupation: Writer Birth: June 28, 1954 Death: December 10, 2016
All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it.….
It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two….
The usual sniggering examples of animal behaviour were brought in to explain cheating. Funny how the behaviour of shrews and gibbons is never used to….
The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead ….
Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How c….
Like most parents, I've been stumped by homework, the big questions, such as: 'What is the point of geography - the pilot always knows where we are g….
Breakfast is everything. The beginning, the first thing. It is the mouthful that is the commitment to a new day, a continuing life..
My father was a film-maker. He always said he wanted to go like Humphrey Jennings, the legendary director who stepped backwards over a cliff while fr….
If the world were to end tomorrow and we could choose to save only one thing as the explanation and memorial to who we were, then we couldn't do bett….
An American has invented a remote control that will turn off any telly within a 20ft radius. What a marvellous device! What a splendid invention! Wha….
America didn’t bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be..
Television in the 1960s & 70s had just as much dross and the programmes were a lot more tediously patronising than they are now. Memory truncates occ….
I don't know how long a child will remain utterly static in front of the television, but my guess is that it could be well into their thirties..
A country scratching a lazy irritation at sagging doorjambs and late trains, whose greatest attribute is a collective, smelly tolerance, where a chap….
You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off..
Once upon a time, a historian told me that the most important choice a new historian could make was of his or her specialist subject. Most of the goo….
Sport is how poor kids from poor countries pass through the eye of the needle to riches and recognition..
Beautifully shot, impeccably paced, it was a clear, unrelenting look at the National Trust, its friends and enemies, and it makes you want to burn yo….
I walk up a dune to a beach and look out to sea, but it's 100km away. The ships lie askew in their dry beds, at anchor for ever. Today is my son's bi….
Get up now and go and find Robert Kilroy-Silk. Smile in a warm, friendly sort of way, then punch him on the nose. Now go and find Robert on televisio….
We like to see death as an unfair conspiracy, and what we want is a magic practitioner, a combination of Dr Watson and Sherlock Holmes..