“Yesterday’s anti-colonialists are trying to humanise the generalised colonialism of power.

Caesar! We who are about to die salute you! So, it is said, the gladiators of old addressed the Roman emperors before they went about the entertaining business of mutual butchering.

At the time of Diana Spencer’s funeral in 1997, I remember writing this: “When the corpse of a 36-year-old woman is dragged around town on a cart you have to acknowledge something stran

As the medieval astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Square strikes the hour, a crowd of tourists duck and crane to capture its face in the viewfinders of their digital cameras and on the

At Canning Town Station, on the Docklands Light Railway platform, the crowd is building up.

At Paddington Station, where one occasionally finds a stray bear with a label around its neck reading: “Please introduce me to a life of prostitution and drug addiction,” the train depa

Dinner with the quality: serpentine water carafes coil up from the polished tabletop, pheasant is bitten.

As I write the traffic is still backed up from the Wandsworth Road – I can hear an occasional frustrated honk from a trapped van man, or the stifled yawp of an emergency services vehicle thre

These are the coldest collations of the year: shards of glass tossed on the kerbstone, dressed with vomit.

Oh, I do so hope, dear readers, that you don’t feel I’ve been neglecting you?

I’ve written before in this magazine about those hideous, collective earworms – the nonce-phrases that clutter up our mouths then fall unbidden from our lips – and I make no apolo

The mot juste is oophagy, meaning that strange form of in utero nourishment whereby embryos feed on eggs produced by the ovary while still in the mother’s uterus.

It must have been a hippy-dippy-happyhoppy fortnight round the David Icke household, what with Jimmy Savile being exposed as a paedophile.

You don’t need to know this – but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness – at others it’s the absence of the crowd that is.

From the moment I knew I was having a baby, I wanted to be brilliant at it.

She’s lying over there in the corner of the room, innocently asleep; her dark face impassive, her scarlet dress neat.

Sitting in the chair at Smile, the fashionable King’s Road salon where I have had my hair sculpted by Keith Wainwright for the past six or seven years, I looked for too long into the abyss of

Millions of people in this country get up every morning and put something with a funny name in their mouths – in 2009 (the last year figures were available), some 39.1 million prescriptions f

I am distressed to see that the hateful expression “builder’s tea” doesn’t have an entry in Jonathon Green’s monumental, three-volume Green’s Dictionary of S