Monthly Archives: December 2010
Vince Cable’s Gaffe
With most cabinet ministers now heading to their Christmas hideaways, it will be interesting to see to what extent the Telegraph stories of subversive Liberal Democrats within the coalition has the life-span of an unpopular panto or has , as they put it in the world of newspaper hacks, ‘legs’ i.e. endurance. In a sense the damage has already been done on two fronts. Firstly if has left Vince Cable as a lame duck cabinet minister- his reputation for speaking out on matters others fear to tread fatally compromised by …
Snow Prayer
So you haven’t been able to buy presents , quite on the industrial scale of previous years, or you might have missed an extra day or two at work, or the car you were driving is now abandoned on some minor road somewhere between Bath and Oxford, or your flight to some place in the sun has been grounded, and you’ve slept your last night , not in a manger, but on the hard floor of a crowded terminal. Well I can’t remember the last time I woke, as I did …
Irish Diary
I was in Dublin last weekend, talking about my latest book Papa Spy at the Cervantes Institute, in an event jointly organised , and charmingly so, by the Hispanic department at Trinity College with a helping hand from former FT colleague Manchester-based Alice Owen, who works as a free-lance publicist. There was a great turn-out of new fans and old friends, led by author and former Irish Times journalist Paddy Woodworth, who knows a fair bit about Spanish culture and history and generously agreed to be ‘in conversation’ with me. …
Football’s Globe Trotters?
FC Barcelona are making their Spanish League wins look so easy that they are in danger of becoming football’s equivalent of the Harlem Globe Trotters. For those of you unfamiliar with the HBT, they are the legendary basketball team that became just so skilful and so much better than any of their rivals that at one point they decided just to focus on exhibition matches- with a bit of theatrics thrown in- as there was no point in pretending there was any competition capable of beating them. They became very successful, …
My Book of the Month is Giles Tremlett’s Catherine of Aragon
Catherine of Aragon is not a name that slips easily off the lips of most English schoolboys, unless they’ve been educated as Catholics, still a minority breed. Few early students of English history have failed to memorise where she was in the Tudor pecking order: ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, and survived. ’ Oh yes, Catherine was the one who was divorced first. Of Henry V111’s eight wives, it is Catherine who has endured in the collective memory of the English people, arguably for the wrong reasons. Catherine was mythified …
