Mind & body.

[The following blog - written in 2009 - still represents my views, but please also see a later blog of mine and its useful link to an Alzheimer's Society position paper on Contented Dementia, which I think states a very similar opinion but with far more authority. RDN, 30 July 2013] Oliver James has written some silly and poorly-argued books and it would have been nice if Contented Dementia, his new offering, was an exception. It isn't. Read more...

The late Dominick Dunne, novelist and chronicler of celebrity trials, was by parts Taki, Jennifer's Diary, The Sunday Times Insight team, Edith Wharton, Thackeray, and J J Hunsecker (of The Sweet Smell of Success). Read more...

Previously, I listed Karen Blixen's house outside Copenhagenand Kettle's Yard, Cambridge as my favourite interiors. Casting around for third, I wondered about including Charleston, the rustic Bloomsbury hangout. Now I have a better candidate: Matisse's chapel at Saint Paul de Vence. Read more...

Betty Miller and Henry James both wrote beautifully about the merits of failure. Here are a couple of quotes from a mid-summer mini-orgy of reading. Read more...

Hot from ENRON, the dazzling show at Chichester Festival Theatre's Minerva Theatre, one realises that it was a romp with next to nothing useful to say. I imagine it will go down a storm when it transfers to the Royal Court. Read more...

The BBC's The Big Questions has asked me on to discuss consumerism. Presumably they want me to defend it and I'm pretty happy to do that. Of course, I intend to be a little mealy-mouthed. I am very happy to defend affluence and inequality. I think people do little harm and much good as consumers, but I suppose consumerism is one degree too materialist to be wholly satisfactory.  Read more...

This is perhaps the most beautiful interior I have ever seen. It is at once bohemian and aristocratic. Karen Blixen being who she was, it is determinedly unbourgeois. It is of course also a wonderful pilgrimage site. Read more...

I never met Sergeant Lee "Jonno" Johnson, Natasha Richardson or Jade Goody but I am proud of them. I suppose other countries can produce such "types", and that if I were American or French I could point to similarly moving or touching personal stories. But still: Blimey! Read more...

The Myerson family saga is a perfect media event. I can think of no-one who is losing. Jake, especially, stands a good chance of benefiting. Read more...