Harry Eyres



Profile:


Full name: Harry Eyres

Area of interest: Arts and culture

Journals: Financial Times

Email: [mailto:harryeyres@care4free.net harryeyres@care4free.net]

Website: Harry Eyres.com

Blog:

Agent:

Networks:



Biography:
Education: Cambridge University: English; Barcelona University: Diploma de Estudios Hispanicos; London School of Economics: MSc Environmental Assessment and Evaluation

Career: Written variously on the Arts, food, literature, music, theatre, travel, for most UK newspapers, including stints as wine columnist for The Spectator (1984/1989); Arts and theatre critic for The Times (1987/1993); wine editor for Harpers & Queen (1989/1996); poetry editor for The Daily Express (1996/2001)

Current position/role: Columnist


 * also writes/has written for:

Other roles: Edits LSE Environment, the newsletter of LSE’s Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance; teaches theatre in London for a consortium of American universities

Other activities: Published poet

Disclosures:

Viewpoints/Insight:

TV/Radio:

Controversy/Criticism:

Awards/Honours: Other:



Books & Debate:

 * Cabernet Sauvignon (Guides to Grape Varieties) OCLC 24750158, 1991
 * The Bluffer's Guide to Wine OCLC 42876316, 1999
 * Hotel Eliseo (poetry collection) OCLC 48572440, 2001

Latest work: Beginner’s Guide to Plato’s The Republic OCLC 48194085, 2001

(and see Harry Eyres.com: books)

Speaking/Appearances: Harry Eyres.com: events and readings


 * 16th November 2008 8.30pm "All that we see is vision" Blake event at Pentameters Theatre, The Horseshoe, Heath Street, Hampstead, London NW3



Financial Times: 'Slow Lane'
Column remit: 'Celebrates the creative use of down-time'

Section: FT Weekend

Role: Commentator

Pen-name:

Email: [mailto:harry.eyres@ft.com harry.eyres@ft.com]

Website: FT.Com / Harry Eyres

Commissioning Editor:

Day published: Saturday

Regularity: Weekly

Column format:

Average length: 850 words



Articles: 2011

 * words can become action'' - The links between saying and doing and their opposites may be impossible to unravel, but their ethical challenges are enough to keep anyone thoughtful awake - 29th January
 * the other hand'' - Harry Eyres speaks out on behalf of an oppressed minority who has suffered in the course of history – left-handed people - 22nd January
 * recipe for cooking'' - At the Slow Food festival, Harry Eyres remembers that he learned the essentials of putting together a dish from a person who knew that it is not about gastronomic one-upmanship but about love - 15th January
 * time and heavenly length'' - Harry Eyres gets a cold sweat after dreaming about a world controller of cricket who decides that the game needs to be drastically slimmed down - 8th January



Articles: 2010

 * to who knows what'' - Harry Eyres says readers help to write his column and sometimes they give him insights into what it is about - 31st December
 * poetic disappearance'' - Harry Eyres looks at new versions of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s ‘The Little Prince’ and is reminded of literary translation’s immense difficulty, creativity and importance - 24th December
 * cards: the angel is in the detail'' - The focus on the humble and obscure instead of the grand and majestic picture closely reflects the original spirit of the season - 18th December
 * indigestion'' -We’re all mad for experience, we live for ‘experiences’, says Harry Eyres, but wonders how much experience can we take in and absorb in full - 11th December
 * a city in need of mercy'' - On a visit to the Italian city, Harry Eyres views two paintings by Caravaggio and reflects on our capacity for cruelty and compassion - 4th December
 * Romans, schoolchildren'' - Latin and ancient Greek are making a comeback in British state schools and helping improve literacy levels. Harry Eyres welcomes the return of the classics’ rich mix of culture and philosophy - 4th December
 * praise of cultivation'' - Higher education should be organised on behalf of students, not vested academic or institutional interests - 27th November
 * from freedom'' - Prisoners have nothing to hide behind; they are humanity with all the trappings stripped away, equal under the sign of the loss of liberty - 20th November
 * far back can we go?'' - The complexity of the different factors that influence climate and their potential interactions is so great that we will never have certain knowledge of them - 13th November
 * essence of humanity'' - Having visited the show at the Wallace Collection in London, Harry Eyres believes he is now in a position to reveal the secret of Poussin’s great philosophical painting ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ - 6th November
 * and greener'' - Seeing that big environmental problems are global in scope, we seek global solutions. But the greatest successes in restoring nature are happening on a local level - 30th October
 * it, I’m a railway voyeur'' - Harry Eyres, who always requests a table seat when he travels, wonders why more and more trains are getting rid of the compartment, which enables travellers to face each other - 23rd October
 * to cultivate a growth industry'' - Many have criticised the application of the verb ‘to grow’ on inanimate entities such as businesses and economies on grounds of grammar or style, but for Harry Eyres, the objections go deeper - 16th October
 * tune with the have-nots'' - Hearing the teenagers of the Teresa Carreño Youth Orchestra of Venezuela perform at the Beethovenfest in Bonn gives Harry Eyres a new perspective on wealth and poverty - 9th October
 * so shallow after all ...'' - The youth of today have been accused of degeneracy. But Harry Eyres thinks they are just as intelligent and appear markedly better at socialising - 2nd October
 * work-shy and not retiring'' - Harry Eyres has a feeling the idea of retirement is rather like that of holiday; much yearned for and fantasised about but often desperately disappointing in practice - 25th September
 * politics and perfect teeth'' - Conductors, business leaders and politicians seem to agree on one thing – that leadership means nothing without the group’s willingness to collaborate - 18th September
 * a vintage summer'' - Neville Cardus believed both cricket and music can bring thousands of people into an arena and still them into silent appreciation of the sublime - 11th September
 * by the wandering hand'' - Harry Eyres says it is worth going back to the earliest and most shocking discussion of the erotic dimension of pedagogy in western literature, the speech by Alcibiades in Plato’s ‘Symposium’ - 4th September
 * that just won’t play ball'' - High-powered people are naturally drawn to high-powered solutions but their grand designs are not necessarily the best - 28th August
 * reap what we have sown'' - On his father’s rice land and citrus orchards Masanobu Fukuoka practised the non-interventionist farming that was his life’s work and philosophy - 21st August
 * and humanity'' - Jacques Barzun will likely be known to posterity as an essayist who trusts in the power of the informed mind to keep the ark of humanity afloat - 14th August
 * intimacy of inspiration'' - What the Marlboro festival expects and demands is that people be open and truthful to themselves, to the music and to each other - 7th August
 * is to be sniffed at'' - In a visit to Cambridge, Harry Eyres is struck by the richness and depth of the personal stories of the ‘college servants’ – and regrets having missed out on them as an undergraduate - 31st July
 * truer measure of summer days'' - The warmest season comes as a lull, a sort of natural siesta preceding the active human time of harvesting, a light-filled sleep matching the dark dormancy of winter - 24th July
 * we’re all Fausts now'' - Harry Eyres used to assume that the New Labour was Faust and the lords of finance Mephisto. But could it be the other way round? - 17th July
 * spartan Shangri-La'' - Simple accommodation turns you outwards rather than inwards, says Harry Eyres, allowing you to fully experience places where the balance of life has not been tilted too far in the human direction - 10th July
 * scissors, tones'' - Harry Eyres is discouraged to hear editors sounding the death-knell over newspapers as he notes the profound connection between the medium and democracy - 3rd July
 * travels with Lemuel Gulliver'' - A recent trip to Taiwan reminded Harry Eyres of ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, arriving on an island where he did not speak the language and finding some customs strange - 26th June
 * who live in the memory'' - It was good that Federer and Henin lost with grace in part because so many times they have been on the winning side, inflicting defeat and even humiliation on opponents - 19th June
 * cut or not to cut'' -There is no more important or contentious question in today’s politics than the timing of cuts that most people bel ieve are inevitable - 12th June
 * letters that spell hope'' - One of the things that Harry Eyres likes about the use of ‘DV’, meaning ‘Deo Volente’ or God willing, is that it comes lightly coated in irony – not a sneering sarcasm - 5th June
 * logic of the heart'' - As the bicentenary of Robert Schumann’s birth approaches, Harry Eyres urges us to look at the works of the composer, who adeptly sets into music that acute yearning for what is unobtainable - 29th May
 * to joy: celebrate the beauty of birdsong'' - What the birds convey to Harry Eyres is the quality of unadulterated joyfulness running through nature which humans can only ruefully or dimly apprehend - 22nd May
 * time for snail’s pace politics'' - Harry Eyres thinks the coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats was done in much haste. But in politics, one must know how to play the long game - 15th May
 * place of globalisation'' - Harry Eyres visits southern Taiwan, where plans for a mega-dam threaten one of the most beautiful and ecologically significant valleys in east Asia - 8th May
 * new chapter at Westminster'' - Inspecting the restoration of the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey provided Harry Eyres a satisfyingly long-breathed counterpoint to short-term electoral sound bytes - 2nd May
 * the front line of creation'' - Harry Eyres describes the BBC Music Magazine Awards ceremony as a serious and merited celebration of the kind of sustained excellence in music-making - 24th April
 * of the dead in Rome'' - Harry Eyres observes that not only Protestants, and certainly not only English Romantic poets, are buried in the city’s Cimitero Acattolico - 16th April
 * of the world'' - Harry Eyres pays tribute to the late Spanish novelist Miguel Delibes, a ‘cazador’ who ultimately saw environmental degradation not as a technical problem but as an ethical one - 10th April
 * and spirituality'' - A visit to the Vatican with a bunch of Armagnac producers and professionals leaves Harry Eyres with conflicting images and feelings - 3rd April
 * of inspiration'' - Calligraphy, or just writing better, might help us find more peace and joy in our lives, which seems a good argument for including it in the syllabus - 27th March
 * of delight'' - Frank Pick, the Maecenas of London’s Tube, commissioned some of the best graphic artists, designers and architects to give aesthetic lift to the transit system - 20th March
 * and profound'' - The £50m needed to save Canterbury Cathedral is less than the cost of the Giacometti sculpture sold at Sotheby’s and a fraction of the value of the bonuses paid out by RBS - 13th March
 * to a well-versed soul'' - Harry Eyres pays homage to radical poet and publisher John Rety, who represented, battled for and supported a ‘bizarre old-fashioned decency’ all his life - 6th March
 * silence really exist?'' - The deepest thought that Sara Maitland’s ‘A Book of Silence’ provokes for Harry Eyres is that by surrounding ourselves with noise we are cutting ourselves off from the possibility of bliss - 27th February
 * or exploitation?'' - The Arctic, where some of the most exciting and important research anywhere in the world is being conducted, should at least in part be set aside as a scientific preserve - 20th February
 * of the world'' - You don’t visit the territory carved out by the Czech opera composer Leos Janacek without risk; but the risk is not so much to your physical safety as to your emotional comfort - 13th February
 * from the polar north'' - Weeks of biting cold and sunless days are good cause to be miserable but at Tromsø, Norway, Harry Eyres gets the impression that such extreme conditions can bring out the best in people - 6th February
 * in a cold climate'' - Hard winters bring out the importance of real physical proximity, rather than the long-distance or virtual relationships that many have come to rely on - 30th January
 * by suffering'' - Francisco de Zurbarán’s paintings at ‘The Sacred Made Real’, an exhibition of Spanish art from 1600-1700, leave a lasting impression on Harry Eyres - 23rd January
 * that grow with age'' - A heartening conversation with a distinguished pianist during the quiet holiday period makes Harry Eyres realise the benefits and blessings of ageing - 16th January
 * the beginning'' - Unloved and stumbling, beginners are often treated with condescension and impatience. But, Harry Eyres says, being a novice is not such a bad place to find yourself - 9th January
 * straight is a bit narrow'' - Our obsession with building fast, straightish roads that cut through landscapes and ignore humble settlements might have infected our whole way of thinking - 2nd January



Articles: 2009

 * beings or human resources?'' - We needs to rediscover the values that give us god-like dignity and restore the non-instrumental beauty of the natural world - 26th December
 * in a trough year'' - For Harry Eyres, 2009 was a sobering year when all sorts of material aspirations crashed to earth, but such a year could also be a good time to sort the wheat from the chaff - 19th December
 * graceful revolution'' - Slow Food is as much about farming as about foodiness; it is based on the observation that ‘eating is an agricultural act’ - 12th December
 * matter and religion'' - However you define it, religion has an essential role to play in a combined human effort to make our planet more habitable for ourselves and other species - 5th December
 * have seen the darkness'' - The prospect of a return to the past in the wrong sense worries Harry Eyres on his way to see the Lumière festival of light in the medieval city of Durham - 28th November
 * science need religion?'' - What religion can bring to science, which illuminates many things but cannot tell us what they mean, is passion and community - 21st November
 * science need religion?'' - What religion can bring to science, which illuminates many things but cannot tell us what they mean, is passion and community - 14th November
 * disaster'' - Harry Eyres finds evidence that New Orleans was a human and political disaster. Understanding the nature of the Big Easy’s wounding helped him understand the wounding of the world - 7th November
 * pride and prejudice'' - Instilled into Etonians is an unquestioning belief that they have a right to rule the world, and this is both wonderful and dangerous - 31st October
 * for body, mind and soul'' - Art is profoundly healing, as Harry Eyres finds out after attending a friend’s chamber opera and a dance theatre - 24th October
 * thing at a time'' - The findings of a group of researchers from Stanford University showing that multitasking is a sure recipe for incompetence are not surprising at all to - 17th October
 * marks for Haitink'' - The 80-year-old maestro has a gift of breathing air into orchestral textures. Each layer of sound is clear and differentiated, rather than coalescing into a muddy mass - 10th October
 * and dark shades of green'' - The recent death of flamboyant environmentalist Edward Goldsmith has made Harry Eyres think about the past 40 years of the Green movement – where it came from and where it might be going - 3rd October
 * gash in the fabric of ages'' - Harry Eyres takes a stand against a plan to drive a motorway through and above the undervalued vineyards of the Mosel - 26th September
 * richness in Tuscan villages'' - Harry Eyres revisits the region where he spent summer 30 years ago and realises that the warmth of a greeting can mean more than the splendour of an escutcheoned doorway - 19th September
 * soon: the future'' - Instead of Futurism, which sounds both silly and sinister at the same time, Harry Eyres prefers an ingenious and wisely modest kind of long-term thinking - 12th September
 * poetry'' - The exceptional poetic depth and density of the first 13 minutes of Bill Douglas’s ‘My Childhood’ has generated a four-hour discussion at the National Film Theatre – 5th September
 * and dissatisfied'' - Harry Eyres goes to the Proms to hear Daniel Barenboim conduct his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and concludes that sometimes very high, if not unrealistic, expectations are justified - 29th August
 * and defenders'' - A book that takes one back to the innocent dawn of football as a mass spectator sport, makes Harry Eyres sympathise strongly with players’ demands for more money – in 1909, at least - 22nd August
 * and balances'' - Harry Eyres finds himself more gripped than he had expected while watching a documentary on the French funambulist Philippe Petit - 15th August
 * a glass to Galileo'' - In an exhibition in Florence, Harry Eyres is struck by the sheer modesty of Galileo’s telescope, hardly bigger than a fold-up umbrella, and his beautiful watercolour sketches of the moon in various phases - 8th August
 * and the good life'' - Failing to recapture the excitement for culture on a recent trip to the Tuscan capital, Harry Eyres realises that a dull day can be redeemed by a burst of glory at the end - 1st August
 * and its brandy'' - Nothing is entirely predictable in the remote French region, not least the sheer variety of ways, times and places in which one can drink its most famous product - 1st August
 * disconnect'' - Harry Eyres wonders why it takes breakdown and disconnection to achieve an opening up to the world - 25th July
 * on terra firma'' - Lord’s is the site of a complex history and conflicting movements: towards enclosure and exclusivity and towards an opening up to the world - 18th July
 * you, without you'' - Profound inner transformation – a more organic, silent but momentous shift in the whole machinery of the self – could help remedy global problems - 11th July
 * prime position'' - Defeat in a tennis match teaches Harry Eyres a lesson in groundwork and preparation, but he warns that being too good at manoeuvring has its downside - 4th July
 * ‘The planet’s still working’'' - Only 36,000 pairs of swifts now visit the UK, and the reason is within our control. Recent trends in building both offices and houses have eliminated the nooks and crannies necessary for swift nests - 27th June
 * back in the city'' - As proven by Meanwhile Gardens in west London, there are crannies in cities all over the world which, with a bit of imagination and will, can be greened - 20th June
 * antidote to fear and fury'' - A production of ‘Peter Grimes’, the opera about xenophobia which has conquered the world, sends Harry Eyres wondering if the stranger we are afraid of is really ourself - 13th June
 * there a corner for poetry?'' - The recent media hullabaloo about poetry in the UK has made me question why we ruthlessly marginalise and exile it to a cold place of almost total neglect - 6th June
 * backwaters'' - From the dingy and Dickensian to the profoundly civilised, they are not simply shops – and they are curiously important in the literary culture - 30th May
 * sour smell of excess'' - High-claiming MPs are wrong in assuming that frugality is an ancient virtue, no longer applicable in the world of globalised capitalism - 23rd May
 * cultural revolution'' - Harry Eyres is beginning to think that Britain has undergone a cultural revolution of its own, less dramatic than the one in China, but no less far-reaching in its effects - 16th May
 * mourning for the newly dead'' - Harry Eyres attends the funeral of a friend who died too young, and is left with a series of untied ends, a jigsaw with missing pieces and unanswered questions - 9th May
 * to look and listen'' - Getting the highest possible yield out of time could turn it into a wasteland in which no moment can be enjoyed for its own sake - 2nd May
 * green fingers'' - Driving out of London at Easter, Harry Eyres realises how many shades of green nature puts out, just for a few short weeks every April and May - 25th April
 * is not for geeks'' - Harry Eyres works on his tennis and discovers that self-improvement can be a thoroughly enjoyable way of enhancing the expression of one’s humanity - 18th April
 * in search of direction'' - Reading Obama’s autobiography, Harry Eyres finds it remarkable how the US president overcame ethnic and ideological confusion, and transformed them into an inclusive orientation - 11th April
 * Madonna read Nietzsche?'' - The philospher correctly predicted the inflation of materialism, but didn’t foresee its own collapse and the attempt of world leaders to breathe life back into it - 4th April
 * to the sound of heartfelt thanks'' - Harry Eyres attends a surprise 50th birthday party for woman who has lived a full unselfish life as a daughter, teacher, mother, wife, member of a church and choir administrator - 28th March
 * first Slow Down festival'' - Harry Eyres on a programme that offers fulfilling approaches to live the slow life – from intellectual debate to more practical opportunities such as poetry, yoga, walks and even wine tastings - 28th March
 * love and nature prevail'' - Scottish minister-poet Andrew Young believed human civilisations are ultimately subsumed into the much greater natural order - 21st March
 * of Plato today'' - Harry Eyres may disagree with Plato’s ideas on democracy but is amazed by the relevance of ‘The Republic’ to our particular dark and uncertain time - 14th March
 * the soul sing of joy and heartache'' - On a recent trip to Spain, I began to think of how much meaning resides in the unique and untranslatable word ‘alegría’ - 7th March
 * hope is all you have'' - All over the world, cultures face annihilation or assimilation by dominant forces. But ‘creative adaptation’ could be a third way - 28th February
 * joyful inventions'' - Unparalleled in fame during his lifetime but seriously underrated today, the Austrian composer’s freshness marks him out as an all-time musical great - 21st February
 * comfort of strangers'' - Despite being stranded, Harry Eyres finds himself warmed by a kind of internal glow after making a new acquaintance with whom he talked and went on an excursion to while away the time - 14th February
 * The past is a foreign country - At Vienna Art Week Harry Eyres is repeatedly drawn to probably the most staid and old-fashioned art collection in western Europe, the Kunsthistorisches Museum - 7th February
 * Recovery or reappraisal? - One good thing about a breakdown, you might think, is that it offers the opportunity to evaluate our values - 31st January
 * Freedom and the price of oil - During the first energy crisis in the 1970s, a maverick historian and ecologist pointed to the human mind as the source of both the problem and the solution - 24th January
 * Hope is within reach - In a year of severe contractions in the economy, Harry Eyres decides that yoga is a good place to start stretching and reaching out in a décontracté frame of mind - 17th January
 * Our Horatian winter of content - As darkness falls and the temperature plunges, Harry Eyres does just what the Roman poet ordered in the beautiful ninth poem of his first book of odes - 10th January
 * In memory of soul-searching - In order to restore our own soul, we need to stop destroying the world’s – which includes its habitats, eco-systems and threatened species - 3rd January



Articles: 2008

 * Intelligence service - The crass manner by which Edward Stourton was replaced has produced a great wave of anger at yet another cack-handed mismanagement from the BBC - 27th December 2008
 * Trumpeting the voluntary - Last month my father had to go for daily radiotherapy treatments at a hospital in Oxford – about 35 miles from where my parents live, and too far for him to drive in the circumstances - 20th December 2008
 * Words in Air - This collection gathers the prolific correspondence between poets Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, about their own and others’ work and the way each was influenced by the other - 20th December 2008
 * Secular lessons from the School of Life - By the end of the Sunday Sermon, Harry Eyres finds himself suddenly yearning for something more serious and heartfelt, where salvation and not just amusement might be at stake - 20th December 2008
 * Challenged by the long read - Harry Eyres’ prejudice against books that are too arcane or convoluted to read with relative fluency has been challenged by Marilynne Robinson’s novel ‘Gilead’ - 13th December 2008
 * Words & Pictures - Although deceptively modest-looking, this is a rewarding and generously illustrated study of the interrelationship of certain English texts and accompanying pictures - 8th December 2008
 * Between yak and yeti - Nowadays artists are expected to articulate exactly what their works are about, which makes Harry Eyres wonder whether Edward Hopper would even scrape a pass degree at art school - 6th December 2008
 * The curse of literalism - Harry Eyres thinks that our tendency to have one-dimensional interpretations on our culture and its key texts puts limits in our capacity to understand ourselves and the world - 29th November 2008
 * Private vice, public virtue - Harry Eyres wonders if London, epicentre of the English vice of hypocrisy, is somewhat ashamed of the Wallace Collection’s prevailing Frenchness and unabashed eroticism - 22nd November 2008
 * Why Alexander truly is great - Lying on the floor in his study with four Chicago paperback translations of Greek tragedies under his head is one of the best things Harry Eyres has found to do recently - 15th November 2008
 * When opposites attract - The oxymoron should not be overused, says Harry Eyres. It is a figure of speech that gains its force from the unexpected, bringing something like an intake of breath - 8th November 2008
 * A composer of nonchalance - Camille Saint-Saëns’ beautifully crafted music can lift spirits untouched by loftier masters and has the priceless quality of being debonair - 1st November 2008
 * A renewed acquaintance - It was not in the academe but in a soot-coated house that Samuel Johnson compiled his lexicon, achieving greatness amid illness - 25th October 2008
 * Switched on but turned off - Harry Eyres sensed trouble while living in a hotel room that seemed designed both to maximise the use of energy and to cut its occupier off from contact with the natural world - 18th October 2008
 * Feet on the ground - Some people have an aversion to the naked sole, but Harry Eyres feels rather the opposite, admiring the silently uncomplaining work that they do and their unsung sensitivity - 11th October 2008
 * South from Granada - Augustus John’s landscape conveys the airy beauty of a rural Mediterranean idyll, which is the true subject of Brenan’s book - 6th October 2008
 * Culture must be brewed long - Harry Eyresis in praise of the political and artistic visions of a British developer and the governor of Lower Austria that seek to assure the long-term sustainability of music and its access to the public - 4th October 2008
 * Autumn and essences - Harry Eyres reflects on the processes associated with the season – ripening that concentrates the goodness in things, and departure marked by anticipation - 27th October 2008
 * Fellowship is a heavenly club - It is not just the tennis Harry Eyres enjoys, but the community at the club. The challenge is extending the feeling beyond his little enclave of grass and AstroTurf - 20th September 2008
 * The flying squad - We tend to think of birds as more distant from us, more mysteriously other, than non-human mammals - 19th September 2008
 * A libation to the last Lafite - I spent the end-of-summer weekend quietly, with my parents at home in the Chilterns - 13th September 2008
 * Are we all star-crossed? - Last week Slow Lane sat at the high table. I was summoned to the annual Salzburg Trilogue to discuss matters of grave import – the challenges facing a globalised world, under the title “Global Visions – Are We Speaking a Common Language?” – with movers and shakers in the three spheres of the arts, business and politics - 6th September 2008
 * Let us restore our full range - Two expeditions, from recent wanderings in the deep interior of Spain, completed days before the terrible plane crash at Madrid airport - 30th August 2008
 * Yes, recession has its blessings - How do you write a piece looking at the upside of economic downturn without sounding smug or heartless, or just out of touch with reality? - 23rd August 2008
 * Let’s hear it for the Proms - Amid much stern diagnosis of the ills afflicting Britain by my colleague Tyler Brûlé, and his recommendations for radical surgery, can I point out something that seems right and doesn’t need changing but could do with a little more trumpet-blowing? - 16th August 2008
 * The rightness of summer - All the words for summer seem beautiful, but the most beautiful to me is the Greek word kalokairi - 9th August 2008
 * The End of Food - review of The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry by By Paul Roberts - 4th August 2008
 * A touch of artistry - In his underrated travel book Iberia, James A Michener speaks of his feeling of nervousness at being invited to jump up and down on the vaults above Room XII at the Prado, which houses 26 masterpieces by Velázquez - 2nd August 2008
 * County Durham: not the pits - When my friend Helen announced she was holding a significant birthday party in County Durham, 260 miles north of London, there was a certain amount of groaning in the household. Why couldn’t she have the party in Camden Town? - 26th July 2008
 * Live life with a flourish - Forty years ago, America's Summer of Love had already turned sour with the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy - 19th July 2008
 * It’s watershed time for rivers - Not long ago, the passing-bell tolled for the Yangtze River dolphin - 5th July 2008
 * The dangers of banality - Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" - 28th June 2008
 * Meet the ancestors - Going to see Ibsen's intense late drama Rosmersholm at London's Almeida Theatre recently, I was struck by two aspects of the play I hadn't fully appreciated when studying it for A-level English - 21st June 2008
 * Reasons we need Chopin - The other weekend BBC Radio 3 held a Chopin jamboree – two days entirely devoted to Poland’s great poet of the piano - 14th June 2008
 * In the days before the flood - Now that the credit crunch and high food and commodity prices have come along and seem here to stay, David Cameron’s Conservatives, according to the British historian and commentator Max Hastings, would be wise to drop all their high-minded guff about the environment - 7th June 2008
 * Pruning vines and verses - Pruning and generally cutting back vegetation is not my natural thing. Unlike my father, who has waged grim war with invasive weeds, ivy and old man’s beard, I have a weakness for letting nature take its course - 31st May 2008
 * The gym won’t fix it - The phrase “taking exercise” has an ambivalent ring for me. It tends to sound admonitory and joyless: you might expect a doctor or an insurance company to urge you to take more exercise - 24th May 2008
 * The heaven in our midst - Ibet you have never heard of John Thornton. You may know someone else of that name but the John Thornton I mean was a 15th-century glazier from Coventry in England. Between 1405 and 1408 he worked on his masterpiece, which still stands in situ. It is the Great East Window of York Minster, the largest medieval stained glass window in existence, and one of the finest - 17th May 2008
 * Touching moments - When I set off for Spain on a life-changing reconnaissance mission in the spring of 1983, my first port of call was Pamplona - 10th May 2008
 * Lessons of an Andean ordeal - A couple of weeks ago, five British girls, four of them gap-year students on an adventure holiday, were killed in a road accident in Ecuador - 2nd May 2008
 * Poetry on prescription - The Renaissance doctor Paracelsus stressed the vital importance of the dose. “All substances are poisons; there is none which is not a poison. The right dose differentiates a poison - 26th April 2008
 * The real meaning of lunch - In Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company the drunken Joanne raises a toast to “the ladies who lunch/ ... Lounging in their caftans/ And planning a brunch/ On their own behalf/ Off to the gym/ Then to a fitting/ Claiming they’re fat” - 19th April 2008
 * Sound discovery - The other night I was struck by a feeling that sometimes hits me and that I call nostalgia for the real. Walking along London streets I occasionally get a whiff, in my mind's nose, as it were, of pungent woodsmoke and recall an ancient house with a wide fireplace in the hills north of Rome. This night-time nostalgia was not for smells but sounds - 12th April 2008
 * Old haunts, new memories - A city, especially for an impressionable youngster escaping his or her background, can become like a lover. For generations of American writers, fleeing the prairies of the midwest or the ghettos, that city was Paris - 5th April 2008
 * Broken heartstrings - In the wonderfully warm and frank DVD about his life and work directed by Christopher Nupen and recently released by Allegro films, the violinist Itzhak Perlman makes a profoundly thought-provoking comment about the way artists’ personalities are expressed in their work - 29th March 2008
 * Where everything flows - I've known for some time, from observations of expatriates, that Taiwanese people can be surprisingly superstitious. These apparently extremely modern folk, so good at manufacturing high-tech gadgets, go all pre-modern in certain situations - 22nd March 2008
 * Not sure, don't know - I was intending to write a column on uncertainty and unknowing in the humanities. I meant to begin with my one-time teacher, the great ancient historian Moses Finley and his endlessly repeated refrain (which we tried to imitate in his gravelly, chain-smoker's New York vowels): "we just don't know" - 15th March 2008
 * Every step you take - Everyone knows that one number of a postcode in London can change everything - 1st March 2008
 * Does politics begin at 50? - Approaching 50, let me tell you (if you don’t already know), is not at all like coming up to any other decadal landmark - 1st March 2008
 * Uplift at the airport - You might hope that this columnist would travel by leisurely boat through the Panama Canal but he, too, wings it, when work calls, over the great circles close to the melting poles - 23rd February 2008
 * The judgment of Paris, 1976 - When the most momentous wine tasting in history was held, in June 1976 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Paris, the result was assumed to be a foregone conclusion - 16th February 2008
 * New gang of friends - There's a poem by Seamus Heaney in which he speaks of walking along a Pacific beach and missing some undefinable quality he associates with his native Atlantic - 16th February 2008
 * Heartbreak mountain - Sometimes a premature passing hits you hard. So it was for me, and I guess many thousands of others, with the sudden death of the actor Heath Ledger at 28 - 9th February 2008
 * Safe sex, dangerous love - One of my most heartening recent experiences was tuning in to a series of late-night radio essays about the Roman poet Horace - 2nd February 2008
 * A critical misjudgment - As a schoolboy actor, I played the part of Moon in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound. Moon is the third-string critic, reviewing a dire Agatha Christie-style murder mystery, who finds himself drawn into the drama (the audience sees the critics, watching the action from a mirror auditorium on the far side of the stage) and eventually murdered by the fourth-string critic - 26th January 2008
 * Why morale matters - The only kind of morale that is held to matter much is that of the troops - 18th January 2008
 * Tremendous trifles - I used to be a great works snob and to look down on minor works. When I was 10 or 11 I remember beating time to Beethoven’s Fifth (a major work if ever there was one) and announcing to my mother that I wanted to become a conductor. “What, a bus conductor, darling? How lovely!” replied my distracted parent - 12th January 2008
 * In staying put, came peace - The days at the turn of the year have not always been the happiest for me. Burdened with expectation, they behaved like bad-tempered donkeys, upsetting their own apple-cart with long-stored resentment - 5th January 2008

