It was not just to earn a few spare millions and world acclaim that my frequent collaborator Denny Lawrence and I, over twenty-five days of two Christmas breaks, co-wrote in rainy heat our genial confection Shakespeare in Italy wherein young Will is recruited in Rome as a Papist spy by Peretti, Pope Sixtus V, inventor of waterboarding. It was also to show that workaday writers […]

I haven’t read and so can’t say what the famed Lionel Shriver novel We Have To Talk About Kevin was like, but the film Lynne Ramsey made out of it was unsettling, upsetting, disruptive, traumatic and for some life-changing, suicide-inducing for others, abortion-inducing for at least a few, and, at its heart, a tremendous, fraudulent wank. It is not circumstance, this fool film asserts, that […]

Sunday, 11.05 am At Evan Williams’s pre-Christmas lunch party yesterday (with John Bell, Ross Gittins, Gill Appleton, Myfanwy Horne, Leo Schofield, Viv Skinner, John Edwards, Geoff Lehman, Ed Campion and a goodly number of greybeard eminences with faces I know and names I forget, but not, this year, Gough Whitlam, or Margaret), I found Brian Johns aghast at at having heard of that morning’s Insiders’ […]

Anonymous gives us a grimy, cluttered, unsanitary, conspiratorial, suspicious, truth-managed and bastard-swapping England of Elizabeth, Essex, two Cecils, the sonnetee Southampton, Ben Jonson, Dick Burbage, Chris Marlowe, Henslowe and Kempe– and the great Globe itself — that beggars disbelief, so fine is the costuming and the dusty heaped interiors and the muddy Bankside vistas over miles of authentic City. It gives us torture chambers, a paranoid […]

As always, Gillard knows how to add but cannot hear the inner music of the numbers. She’s gained a vote but lost the Jenkins Effect from a parliament that will hereinafter seem a cage of whooping, leaping Neanderthals. She is also the stupidest dramatist ever to kiss hands and take the oath in our democracy. To force Harry out of the post that he and […]

From earliest times the drama of Rome has been about lovers caught at it, and the big lies that underpin respectability in the upper-middle classes. Giovanni Veronese’s fine three-parter Ages of Love, the third of his praised series A Manual of Love, carries on this tradition, in the age of skypes  and texts and phone-cameras and an ever more godlike, watching technology. In Youth a […]

Friday, 7.25 pm My new co-written book The Year It All Fell Down is not yet commenced but concerns, of course, the earthquakes, meltdowns, tornadoes, economic shambles, refugee drownings and Arab uprisings, the crackdowns, facedowns, shootouts, lockouts, arrests, royal weddings and assassinations of a year not yet completed, the fall of Mubarak, Ghadafi, Murdoch, Bin Laden, Keneally, Rann, Strauss-Kahn, Palin, Perry, Cain, the shooting of […]

2.05 am I watched Bear Grylls this morning bitcoin conversation, and learned how he invested in a trading platform that trade on your behalf.  I started off with $250 and made amazing returns.  The platform is very easy to use and has helped many people to become millionaires as a results. The software uses an advanced algorithm […]

It was Charles Dickens I guess who invented the narrative plotline of a crabbed, unrepentant old man forced by a pestering visitant on Christmas Eve to review and assess his past life lest he go to his grave unthankful. And Frank Capra who, in It’s A Wonderful Life, asked what the world would have been like without him, before Richard Curtis added, in Love Actually, […]

A tour de force in its way and a simmering wonder, mostly, of great acting and fine directing, Fred’s awed glance at White’s World is nonetheless arch and portentous, expensive, smug and windy, and a crashing failure as drama. Playing upperclass, boarding-schooled Australians raised rich in the 1930s, Davis and Rush correctly brandish the off-BBC accents of the time, but their rich Edwardian mother Charlotte […]