Notebook
Letter from Donetsk
For what is technically peacetime, there’s a lot of shelling going on round here. Donetsk airport is still held by…
A letter from the border
Turkey, Syria It is the early hours of the day that Parliament votes on whether to bomb the so-called ‘Islamic…
Gaudy notebook
As the BA flight from Warsaw landed at Heathrow, I felt a little tremor of anxiety, though it wasn’t anything…
Letter from Haiti
This summer, I returned to Haiti for the first time in ten years. I was itching to see how the…
Farewell notebook
So we are all going to have to pay for fatties to have stomach bands and bypasses, are we? It…
Baghdad notebook
In the passport queue at Baghdad airport, my heart sinks. This place vies with Cairo for the title of most…
D-Day Notebook
The phrase ‘ring of steel’ hardly begins to describe the operation here in Calvados country as we await the 70th…
A broadcaster’s notebook
I usually spend most of the week at home in South Devon in front of my computer. But for the…
Damascus Notebook
As I looked out of the window of my hotel bedroom, studying the view of central Damascus, the mobile phone…
Crimean notebook
Vladimir Putin still swears that there are no Russian troops in Crimea, so their mission is to say as little…
An actor’s notebook
It was one of those weeks. On Monday, I was in four countries: I woke up at crack of dawn…
New York notebook
Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known…
Florence Notebook
Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though…
Artist’s Notebook
We live by simple stories. X has a stroke. X recovers; or doesn’t. But we live inside more complicated stories.…
Letter from London
John Lloyd, producer of Blackadder, Spitting Image, QI etc, has boldly picked up where he left off at Cambridge more…
Digital Notebook
I’m in London to work on impossible.com, the social network I have been developing for two years. Impossible is a…
A writer’s notebook
Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, the Master of the Queen’s Music, recently wrote about the almost total ignorance of young people…
Notebook
All eyes on the Philippines this week, and rightly so. Godspeed to those American and British ships making their way…
Bushfire notebook
Australia One of the odd things about bushfires as we know them in Australia is the unlikely truces declared between…
A POINT OF VIEW
Until I plotted a book on England’s best views I had not realised how much people cared. Ask them to…
A Transylvanian notebook
Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…
Letter from Somaliland
Ayan Mahamoud, one of the organisers of Hargeysa’s International Book Fair, has all the girly vulnerability of a factory-tested steel…
St Tropez Notebook
I recently had to spend a great deal of time attempting to clear my name from a ludicrous assertion in…
A Fisherman’s Notebook
You remember the climax of Jaws — the primeval moment when Quint the crazed Ahab-like fisherman goes mano a mano…
