I'm in Los Angeles to shoot, rather perversely, a show named Boston Legal. Having visited many times over the past decade, I remain struck by my foreignness. You cannot fill your car with petrol, walk a block or look out of a window at dusk as the sun turns crimson orange without having a mobile phone ad or TV drama thrust at you from a billboard. Perhaps this is not [...]

I am in a Tolpuddle frame of mind. Due to attend the Tolpuddle Martyrs' Festival in Dorset, I find myself not getting there, but spending the weekend thinking much about it. From school age onwards I have spent years passing through the thoroughfare that is Tolpuddle Street in London N1. Running close by is Copenhagen Street, the site, I now discover, of a 19th-century demonstration, 150,000-strong, held in support of [...]