Is life after death scientifically possible?
When science and religion got divorced in the nineteenth century, they split up the family possessions in a reasonably amicable…
Why I welcome bad book reviews
An old friend of mine – I’ll call her Gloria to save her face – admitted to me, “I’ve written…
Schoolgirls who helped win D-Day
The British, Canadian and US invasion troops who landed on the Normandy beaches on D–Day, 6 June 1944 were fortunate…
Why my Uncle Bill was Contemptible
When Germany invaded Belgium and France in August 1914, many people on both sides thought it was going to be…
Who is the worst villain in fiction?
There is no shortage of candidates from which to choose in this game that anyone can play. There are the…
Should Eliza Doolittle marry Professor Higgins?
George Bernard Shaw wrote his celebrated play Pygmalion, on which My Fair Lady is based, in 1912. It opened in…
The Wisdom of Crowds
Since the beginning of the “age of the common man” in the nineteenth century, there has been a widely held…
What makes a novel good?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, as Elizabeth Bennett might have put it, that the novel is a story about…
Why SOE gave away Britain’s top war secret to the Nazis
At a crucial stage of World War II, the Special Operations Executive deliberately allowed one of its most closely guarded…
How to tell bad companies
Some years back, I published a book titled Bad Company: Behind the corporate mask, which the Sunday Times was generous enough to…