18 December 1998

Pensions is one of those subjects that sees British public debate at its worst. It belongs, alongside the Schleswig-Holstein question, local government finance and the Common Agricultural Policy, in a ... read more

Tuesday I am just finishing a note to Dr Jack, detailing the political objectives of my proposed Minnesota visit, when M calls from the heart of his barony.

"Lynton, love ... read more

Saddam's sideshow Western pronouncements on Iraq reached a threatening and decisive note (again), as the UN ordered its weapons inspectors out of the country. There is little room for ... read more

Last week we had a visitor. He has been before but has never stayed so long. I hesitate to mention the matter lest a gang of red-coated thugs bring their ... read more

In my mid-30s I have discovered what so roused the adolescent William Hague late at night in bed. He was only 13, but I am as excited now as he ... read more

A working-class hero is something to be. But only if you like the working class and much of the time I don't. I grew up in a class where people ... read more

When I was younger, my spin doctor said,

Tony, please sweeten your tongue,

And what he told me I'll never regret,

For I've stayed eternally young,

He said, Son, you'll ... read more

We base ourselves on the idea that we must peacefully co-exist, said Nikita Khrushchev - clearly a man who had never lingered in Purley where, shortly before Christmas, Sir Bernard ... read more

I haven't had time to read today's paper yet, but I might just as well not read it, because I saw the news on the telly last night: the deaths ... read more

Good King Wenceslas had better look out. Not that his virtue, to which we attest, more or less tunefully, at this time of year, is in doubt. But is the ... read more

English, as we are often told, is a living language whose meaning changes as the world changes. This is particularly true of politicians' English, which has always employed ever more ... read more

The most memorable scene in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita was provided by blonde, buxom Anita Ekberg splashing about in Rome's Trevi fountain. In its spontaneous and joyous exhibitionism, Ekberg's ... read more

"You know Albany - the haunt of bachelors, or of married men who try to lead bachelors' lives - the dread of suspicious wives, the retreat of superannuated fops, the ... read more

Happy Christmas. Just by writing those words from here, I feel like part of some samizdat press movement secretly sending out furtive greetings. For though we are told that 96 ... read more

It could not have happened to a nicer party. You can almost smell the beer hall and hear the smack of knuckle on flesh. The lurid self-destruction of Jean-Marie Le ... read more

Farmers aren't very popular. Those who are rich are assumed to have succeeded at the expense of the rest of us. They have cheated us, poisoned us, destroyed the very ... read more

The best place to think about the future of religion, in my experience, is over a cup of coffee - or, to be precise, over a tall, semi-skimmed vanilla latte ... read more

British Constitutional Revolution: challenges for the English regions (Centre for Reform, Dean Bradley House, 52 Horseferry Road, London SW1P 2AF, 0171-222 5121, £5). The Lib Dem peer Dick Newby offers ... read more

Obliging soul that he is, David Attenborough suggested that he come to the NS office for this interview. He arrives brandishing his pensioner's rail pass and extolling the virtues of ... read more

The good relationship these days is central to our idea of happiness. We tell researchers that, apart from staying free of serious illness, the quality of our relationships is our ... read more

Two Christmases ago my mother made a series of unusual telephone calls to London from her home in Trinidad. "Is your father coming home for the Christmas holidays?" she asked ... read more

On the eve of the great mutiny of 1857, Lucknow, the capital of the kingdom of Avadh, was indisputably the largest, most prosperous and most civilised pre-colonial city in India. ... read more

I never quite know what to do about Christmas cards. Some years I send them, some years I don't. The result is a strange sort of fractured, dislocated correspondence from ... read more

Mr Park, a self-employed technician from Melksham, Wiltshire, first put up his Christmas decorations in the summer of 1993 to "cheer himself up". They have not been down since.

Each ... read more

Christmas, the season of goodwill, is also the season of tyranny. It is the season when little children blackmail their parents to buy the toy that is all the rage ... read more

By this stage you will have been sickened by the endless pretentious articles, in every colour supplement and magazine you have looked at in the past fortnight, telling you how ... read more

Victoria Glendinning, biographer"A thorough international review and control of the arms trade. For governments to admit that conflicts have happened and will continue to do so because the powers ... read more

Every December I am asked to write something for the press about "how to survive Christmas" or "why Christmas is such hell". Usually I take the money and run but ... read more

I've got to be away on the afternoon my two-year-old son is having his pals round for a pre-Christmas get-together, so we need a replacement Santa Claus. My suggestion of ... read more

"Thank God it happens only once a year," my mum invariably says. Yet for years I had two Christmas Days, one straight after the other. Both with presents and hot ... read more

"Besides this earth, and besides the race of men,there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits;that world is round us, for it is everywhere("Jane Eyre" ... read more

When John Major departed from 10 Downing Street he left behind more than just memories of snatched sandwiches over his desk and morning tea in the kitchen with Norma. He ... read more

I had a question for the British ambassador. What country were we in, I wondered? He stopped, frowned, and replied that he was as lost as I was. This was ... read more

John is not typical of the homeless. Well educated and articulate, he has slept rough for five years, ever since his wife died. Since his loss, John has sought refuge ... read more

The year's end may seem an unlikely time to start waxing sentimental about the British weather. Winter in Britain, even when it isn't chilly, means skies the colour of dishwater ... read more

Do you have to live outside your own country to understand fully its national characteristics and foibles, both positive and negative? Having lived most of the past decade in Washington, ... read more

It must have been all the excitement, but as I entered the soaring new Mormon temple in Lancashire, I was distracted by an urge to perform an irredeemably earth-bound function. ... read more

If you're vegetarian, it's so simple. You just cut meat out of your diet. The issue is entirely in your own hands. Everybody else may eat meat if they wish, ... read more

The Masai are not labelled Kenya's most conservative tribe for nothing. Their daily lives have hardly changed for centuries: the men graze their goats and cattle on the dry, dusty ... read more

I tried to talk to a fellow passenger on the Tube recently. I did this, I hasten to add, not out of some strange perversion nor for a sociological study, ... read more

Jack Straw's secret is now thrillingly out in the open. Against all expectations, the new draft freedom of information bill is the most radical departure this government has yet undertaken. ... read more

One of the pervading ironies of the Internet is that it was largely built by anarchists but paid for by the military; both parties believed that they were getting a ... read more

The "I" word? Sounds like it's getting serious . . .It certainly is. No US president has actually been impeached since 1868.

So Clinton could be removed from office ... read more

Mark Leonard is partly right - we do feel safer on the streets after dark when there are plenty of people about ("Just get out and have fun!", 4 December). ... read more

Would you care to tell us more about the Ministry of Defence police - the chaps who dawn-raided Gillian Linscott ("Dawn raids: a guide to the etiquette", 11 December)? The ... read more

You lead on "Warning: inequality kills" (4 December), Steve Richards follows on taxes, then there's a piece on (groan!) the Third Way. But you fail, like the Labour government, to ... read more

Under a previous Statesman editor there was a profusion of letters from Keith Flett. A change of editor brought welcome relief for some time, but I notice he has crept ... read more

Francis Beckett argues plausibly that "old" Labour could have won the election in 1992, which was lost only after an untimely stumble in support precipitated by televised images of the ... read more

Peter Wilby tells us that since 1992 the news agenda has been dominated by royalty, the sex lives of politicians, footballers and pop stars (Media, 11 December). Isn't he really ... read more

John had found Vienna to be even more absurd than he remembered. The name was a problem to begin with: in German "Wien"; hence wiener; hence - when he was ... read more

Last week I visited Liverpool, a place which remains one of the great cities. The northern skies glowered as if a hurricane were on the way. At a fine high ... read more

"Damien?" says Brian Sewell, his expression somewhere between a rictus and a moue. "Oh, he's really not entirely without talent, you know. I mean, the dead sharks are all crap, ... read more

There are not many products we have not even troubled to name. But the television remote control unit, a functional description, became "the remote", and there we left it. Like ... read more

The Hubble telescope, anchored 350 miles above the earth, boldly goes where no man has gone before - straight to the heart of the Universe. Since December 1993, when its ... read more

Britain feels saturated with music, but there is precious little left of national origin and tradition. If there was ever such a thing as the voice of the people, it ... read more

In a year of concerts many will be good, many bad, and more will be somewhere in between. A couple will be great. Was anything more disappointing than Seiji Ozawa's ... read more

Considering the recent surge in that hybrid TV form the docu-soap, you might think we'd be sceptical about the supposed separateness of filmed reality and fiction. Yet at heart we're ... read more

Just when everyone else has jumped off the flagging bandwagon he helped design, Paul Watson this week abandoned the fly-on-the-wall documentary and went back to interviewing people. The result, White ... read more

Raymond Briggs's Snowman is celebrating his 20th birthday (that makes him, I believe, in snowman years pretty ancient). But his charms have not melted away with time. He is to ... read more

Keith Dawson was walking on Cape Cod when he found a roll of film abandoned on a wooden bench. One of the small, innumerable sadnesses of modern life: someone would ... read more

Do you like mince pies? Or Christmas pudding? Or that marzipan-coated fruitcake that gets wheeled out with more mince pies, just when you've almost got your breath back from lunch? ... read more

Decadent is the season. Jewels and furs and little black dresses are shimmering down every dark street. Fairy lights adorn every tree. In every corner of London champagne bottles jostle ... read more

Once in a while, you receive an offer you can only refuse. An American publisher suggested earlier this year that I achieve boundless fame and wealth by creating a European ... read more

I had lunch last week with two agents who between them look after Alan Shearer, Michael Owen, David Beckham, Dwight Yorke, David Platt, Dion Dublin, Gary Lineker, Graeme le Saux, ... read more

How many British people fail to yawn at the mention of Europe? Few topics of conversation are such a powerful bromide. Yet if nothing else has sedated the citizenry more ... read more

Reading Woodrow Wyatt's posthumously published diaries is like eating a Chinese meal: there are plenty of tasty titbits (the Queen Mother is supposedly a closet Thatcherite, Rupert Murdoch once considered ... read more

Chinese leaders, whose flacks emphasise their "plain living" (a bowl of noodles handed to them by a modest wife is always enough), have a penchant for self-eulogising titles. Jiang Zemin, ... read more

Fiction

John Banville: The Untouchable (Picador, £5.99)

Emmanuel Carrere: Class Trip, translated by Linda Coverdale (Quartet, £6)

Raymond Carver: Elephant and Other Stories (Harvill Press, £6.99)

Stella Duffy: Singling out ... read more

Poetry anthologies should fit in your pocket, to be lived with, mulled over and dipped into. Then again they should be capacious, exhaustive and many-angled, making the case that poetry ... read more

Paul Theroux came on stage at the Lyttleton Theatre on the South Bank to loud applause. He then started ruffling papers and reading quotes from negative reviews. Turning to the ... read more

No 3557 Set by John O'Byrne

You were asked for business euphemisms for 1999.

It's true: we British were born to speak in euphemisms. ... read more

Two old men are standing outside the Argos shop, killing time. At the railway station, the commuters with first-class tickets line themselves up at the precise point they always go ... read more

I certainly don't wish to fill a column which has got to last you for the next two weeks with something which will sound like a purely personal grievance. But ... read more