On a sultry night in New York, just over forty years ago, two unassuming Jewish boys from Queens District stepped onto a stage, looked...

‘Through all of my youth I was looking for you,’ wrote yet another American poet you probably haven’t heard of, ‘Without knowing what I...

The wonderful Michael Kidson, who taught me History, had the uncanny knack of knowing when I was giving less than 100%, which, being a...

One of my proudest achievements as a schoolboy was the PE report that I picked up when I was about thirteen: ‘Morgan-Grenville,’ it said...

In a life comprising inexplicable and mainly unimpressive lists, there is one that stands out for me. Since I was about 8, I have kept a...

Yesterday was bad. And I know I have no excuse. I am well; I live in a harmonious house with space and a garden; the world outside is...

By and large, I like to give pornography a miss. Back in those top-shelf of WH Smith teenage years, or in the testosterone-fuelled police...

I used to wear a suit, you know. I used to see my world through the prism of things my upbringing had taught me were sensible, probable...

Joe reads a couple of scientific papers each morning before he gets out of bed. It puts him in the mood for his day job, which is, er,...

One of the symptoms of ADD (attention deficit disorder) is an inability to live in the moment, otherwise known as the need for instant...

There should be an English word for the look of ineffable smugness on the face of a person turning left onto a long-haul flight, or one...

This is all a bit delicate. My paternal granny said that there were three things you really shouldn’t talk about (politics, church and...

‘Life is all memory,’ said Tennessee Williams, ‘except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.’...

No one actually buys a filing cabinet. Filing cabinets just appear in your house one day and, like that annoying Patek Philippe...

The best time to plant a tree, as the old Chinese proverb goes, was twenty years ago; the second best time to plant one is now. As it...

We heard her long before we saw her. Robbie Burns could ‘never hear her loud solitary whistle in a summer’s noon without feeling an...

Of course I bloody inhaled. What else did you think I was going to do? It would have taken a particular kind of idiot schoolboy to have...

IT’S ALL NEHRU’S FAULT. There is a fine line for men of a certain age to navigate between clinging onto the last vestiges of fashion, on...

My Granny loved funerals. ‘You see the best of people there,’ she would say to us. She would not think of turning up ninety minutes...

On Thursdays, I work with trees. In the evolving Grenville life, this gives a welcome architecture to a week whose edges have become...