Magistrates’ courts in small towns are where journalists’ careers were forged back in the heyday of the local paper. It’s where you learned the only thing that mattered was getting it right. Especially names. Spell a name incorrectly and you were dead meat. It’s also where you learned about the warp and the weft of … Read more
When the BBC asked me back in the mid-Seventies to leave the United States and open a television news bureau in South Africa, I knew exactly what I would not do. I would not become one of those ghastly privileged whites who expressed their disgust for apartheid but enjoyed its benefits. I would not, for a … Read more
JOHN HUMPHRYS: What they so often deliver is debt and disappointment. Something has gone horribly wrong in the past couple of decades and it’s time to put it right.
He was just what you would expect a New York cop to look like. Big and tough and chewing gum with his gun strapped to his bulging belly and a bored look on his face. I was a slightly overawed 27-year-old who’d arrived in the U.S. for the first time in his life the night … Read more
There is a very old Jewish joke doing the rounds on Twitter. What’s the difference between a pessimist and an optimist? The pessimist says: ‘It can’t get any worse than this.’ The optimist says: ‘Oh yes it can.’ What makes it funny or, rather, deeply unfunny, is that they are both right. For those who … Read more
Every crisis throws up its heroes. A week ago we’d never heard of Captain Tom. Now the world knows him. Yet all he’s done is walk around his garden. But of course that’s not the point. It’s the spirit he has shown that has inspired us. We don’t know the names of all those NHS … Read more
As close encounters go, it was the sort most of us have probably experienced at least once over the past few weird weeks. The lines in my small local supermarket had been clearly marked. There was one customer in front of me and she was fishing around in her bag for her credit card. I … Read more
The late afternoon sun still had enough warmth to make sitting in my garden a delight. The blackbirds were competing with the robins and a woodpecker was drilling out the occasional rhythmic drum roll — the perfect contrast to the lament of a dove somewhere in the distance. The hoverflies had made a welcome early … Read more
We are all preparing for CV-Day in our own ways. That’s the day when the virus reaches its peak and the phoney war is over. The last real phoney war began when we declared war on Germany and it ended when the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries in 1940. It took another five … Read more
Britain is borrowing again. Big time. Remember the old joke about the American general giving evidence to a congressional committee about spending on armaments? ‘You spend a million here… a million there… pretty soon you’re talking real money.’ It was funny then because a million really was a lot of money (I said it was … Read more