Sweden – Light Shining In The Dark

Give any Swede a chance and he or she will raise a glass to you, launch into a lengthy toast, and, if you are really unlucky, you will be expected to sing, from a song sheet you have already been handed. I blame it on the long dark nights, the cold, the totalitarian, Kafkaesque rules…

Adolph Hitler’s Chair

I sat in Adolph Hitler’s chair last week. Not actually his own personal choice of furniture, but one he had been made to sit on at the HQ of Munich Police. As you can see from the photograph it’s a bland, dull little chair, hardly worthy of its small and somewhat insignificant role in world…

A German Romance

A strange, and totally unexpected thing has happened to me, I’ve fallen in love. Not with a person, but with a country. Germany. That probably sounds strang, coming from the son of a Jewish refugee who saw many of her relatives end up in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Belsen, and until last year,…

15 Seconds Of Fame With Anthony Horowitz

Outside the recent London Book Awards, I bumped into my friend, the phenomenally successful children’s book and television writer Anthony Horowitz (The Alex Rider series of books, Midsomer Murders, Foyles War…) who is married to the equally phenomenally successful, multiple award-winning television producer, Jill Green (Foyles War among many others). (Some years back we worked…

The future of the novel

Peter James explains how reading will change in the new millennium (originally delivered as a speech to the Booksellers Association conference in April 1998) The Observer recently selected a number of items which it predicted would fetch a fortune as prized antiques in a Sotheby’s salesroom in one hundred years time. I was very gratified…