In the memoir of his time as British film censor, John Trevelyan described the terrible trouble caused to him when the Swedish movie I Am Curious (Yellow) arrived on his desk in 1969. It was an unquestionably serious film in which the leading actress, Lena Nyman, did things like conduct interviews in central Stockholm asking passers-by what they thought about the Vietnam war. Unfortunately, a few other scenes showed her [...]

Some years ago, in the days before Christmas, there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and a group of slightly menacing children was standing on the doorstep. One of them held out his hand. "We just sang a carol," he said. "Oh," I said, and handed over some money. It seemed a good enough arrangement.

Finding myself in this Christmas section of the New Statesman, I am [...]

In 1984, Harrison Ford was being directed by Steven Spielberg in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom at Elstree Studios on the edge of London. Stephen, an ailing boy, was invited to the set one day to watch the filming. At one point, Ford surprised Stephen, and his mother, by presenting him with the bullwhip he had used in the film, two tickets to a preview of the film [...]

Fortunately, nobody rang to ask me where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been shot, because I haven't a clue. But I do remember an interview he recorded for Radio 1 a day or so before his death. He was asked a question about the death of Elvis. Lennon said that he had a simple answer: Elvis had really died the day he entered the US army. [...]

Do you want to hear something disgusting? Don't raise your hopes. This isn't the one about me and the goat. I'll save that for when I'm really desperate for material. In fact, to many British people, it will probably be heart-warming.

Once you have children, you find yourself doing strange things that you would never have believed yourself capable of in normal life. Owning animals is one example. I [...]

Once a new art form is invented and established, an infrastructure develops to maintain it: a college to train people to do it, buildings dedicated to it, professional guilds, awards, grants. But, like anything else, art forms can become defunct. This is especially true of forms that depend on performance: masques, mystery plays. W H Auden's first published work, Paid on Both Sides, is a "charade", written to be performed [...]

When I was an avid reader of Biggles, in the late Sixties, I used to try to calculate Biggles's age, because I wanted to know if it was possible that he was still alive. I worked out that he had learnt to fly in the early years of the Great War, and so he must have been about 17 in 1915. This meant that he was probably born in the [...]

I don't usually pay compliments to my wife, Nicci Gerrard, in this column. That's an understatement. I never have. Not once. But last weekend, she achieved something that deserves acknowledgement. She was the first person in the history of the world to write a profile of Joan Bakewell that did not feature the phrase "thinking man's crumpet". Reputedly, this was coined by Frank Muir in the early 1960s. Observer readers [...]

When I was on holiday last week, I finished a book. Not writing one, unfortunately, but reading one. My copy of Balzac's Lost Illusions looks in a wrecked state, as befitting a book that has been taken on holiday three times before being finished. According to Graham Robb's biography, it seems that I took longer to read the book than Balzac took to write it. And it's no good me [...]

It is not in any way my intention to write an amusing column about the latest escalation in violence between the Israelis and Palestinians, though, come to think of it, you could imagine this as a Statesman comp in a malevolent alternative universe: sum up the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a single limerick.

But wasn't there something strange about the bombing of the US Navy destroyer in the Yemeni port [...]