. . . If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.Hamlet

On the evening of Hazel Blears’s resignation from the government, I went to see Jude Law in the Michael [...]

In July 1989 I graduated from university, and then, shortly afterwards, during that unusually warm and settled summer, set off to travel across Europe by train. The plan was to head east; something was stirring behind the Iron Curtain and I wanted to find out more about what was going on. On one journey I got as far as the Czechoslovakian border, only to be hauled off a train for not having [...]

In extracts from his exclusive interviews with the New Statesman, David Miliband talks about his childhood, the current state of British domestic politics, and his outlook on foreign affairs.

A former head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit, the Foreign Secretary shares his thinking on the current economic crisis, inequality and redistribution, and David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party.

On international affairs, he ranges across the impact of the [...]

One afternoon in January at a private lunch at the British high commissioner’s residence in Delhi, a fine, white-painted colonial-era house on the flat roof of which were perched several watchful Gurkhas, David Miliband, the British Foreign Secretary, sat at a long, varnished table eating salmon mousse and salad leaves while he took questions from veteran Indian military leaders and retired ambassadors. The lunch began congenially but soon curdled into [...]

Through the Seventies and much of the Eighties my father used to travel to and in India. He worked in fashion and the clothing business, in “the rag trade”. Sometimes he would call from Bombay, Madras or Calcutta, and it would be hard to hear exactly what he was saying, with his voice a wavering echo on an indistinct international telephone line. On several occasions he stayed at the Taj [...]

Last weekend I was in the south of France for a friend's 40th birthday party, held at his villa in the hills above the old town of Mougins. It was cold but sunny, with intense blue skies and the most wonderful clear and penetrating light - so thrilling after the grind and gloom of central London in winter. The party had been organised for a long time. It was enjoyable, [...]

Ian McEwan's latest novel, On Chesil Beach, returns us to the summer of 1962, and to the hopes and aspirations of a young, newly married couple in a stilted and repressed Britain that is soon to be transformed for ever by the political and cultural turbulence of what we simply know now as "the Sixties". They are from respectable, upper-middle-class families, and yet they long for convulsive change and a [...]

Noted at the end of each of the essays collected here is the city in which they were written: Lima, Madrid, Paris, London, Washington DC, Berlin . . . If you did not know already, you would think that Mario Vargas Llosa was trying to tell us something: that, for instance, he is a polyglot cosmopolitan, with homes in many cities, as indeed he has. I once interviewed him at [...]

I arrived in Adelaide in early December, and one of the first things I saw, when I went for a walk around the city, was a giant snow scene, in the Alpine style, occupying a huge area of the lobby of the Hilton Hotel. How ridiculous and kitsch all this fake snow seemed when the temperature outside was 35 degrees and the country itself is drought-stricken. Indeed, the eastern states [...]

When in the late 1990s Ian Hamilton began compiling The Penguin Book of 20th-Century Essays, he was certain that there should be no place for the long profile in his ideal republic of letters. "The rise of the literary 'profile', in newspapers and in glossy magazines, is usually deplored, but it has produced some good writing . . . The trouble is: it tends to get badly out of date [...]