I arrived late at the Savoy Hotel for the recent Crime Writers Association’s very smart event, the Cartier Diamond Dagger Prize. It is a lifetime achievement award, awarded annually. Last year’s recipient was Ian Rankin. This year’s was to be – ah – well – here’s the problem: I hadn’t read the invite, just had…
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…
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 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,…
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…