Bear Grylls’ Island

Bear Grylls’ Island

Published in The Times, 2016

It’s day three of my stay on a desert island in the Pacific, and as it rains ceaselessly in London and temperatures hit zero, I am lying under a tree on a bright white beach alongside two young women who have quickly become friends, watching the Moon shimmering over the surface of the sea and listening to the crashing of waves and the chirruping of exotic wildlife. Sound like paradise? Well, not quite.

Read More

Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel L. Jackson

Published in The Times, 2014

There’s an awkward moment, for me at least, near the beginning of my meeting with Samuel L. Jackson in a hotel bar in Atlanta, Georgia, when I ask him for his opinion on 12 Years a Slave and he leans back in his leather chair, strokes his grey cashmere beanie hat and responds, “Are you asking me that because it is a frontrunner for the Oscars, or because I am black?”

Read More

William Boyd

William Boyd

Published in The Times, 2013

When William Boyd was commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd to write a new James Bond novel, he talked about the gig as if it were the fulfilment of a life’s dream.

He had, he said, first fallen in love with 007 when he was a boarder at Gordonstoun and a copy of From Russia with Love was passed around his “pre-adolescent coevals as if it were some form of rare samizdat pornography”.

Read More

Beef

Beef

Broadcast on the BBC, 2001

Over the years I have shed many of the outward manifestations of my Sikh upbringing. I cut my long hair off when I was 14, 5000 days of hair growth falling to the floor of a barber’s shop like a dead crow. I last danced to bhangra at a wedding in Wolverhampton in 1999, looking as if I was being electrocuted while trying to simultaneously unscrew two light bulbs. And I’m so rusty in what was once my mother tongue that I struggle to convey simple instructions concepts such as “call the fire brigade, please” in Punjabi.

Read More

Wilbert Rideau

Wilbert Rideau

Published in The Times, 2013

Wilbert Rideau was recently sitting behind his desk in the study of his Fifties red-brick home in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when, looking through the window, he watched a youth walk past a magnolia tree, enter a neighbour’s garage and come out with a leafblower. Being proud of the suburb – “An even mix of black and white households and a good mix of young families, singles and retirees,” he relates in a Southern baritone – and pleased with its low crime rate (“Only 1 homicide in 50 years”), he called the police. But when they apprehended the young man and brought him to Rideau to be identified, the 68-year-old journalist hesitated. “I was 99.99 per cent certain it was him, but I couldn’t say so...” He tails off. “I just wouldn’t want to gamble on that 0.01 per cent.”

Read More

V.S. Naipaul

V.S. Naipaul

Published in The Times, 2010

The prospect of meeting V.S. Naipaul fills me with a strange combination of excitement and trepidation. The author has written 20 mesmerising books of fiction and non-fiction, but is also notoriously difficult, famed for once reportedly dressing down Iris Murdoch while dining with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, for once greeting George Lucas with the remark “I don’t know Star Wars, I am not interested in films”, and for once also describing interviewers as monkeys.

Read More

Martin Amis’ Money

Martin Amis’ Money

Published in The Times, 2010

There is a certain kind of bloke — and, let's face it, it's always a bloke — who cites Martin Amis as his favourite author. Now in his thirties or forties, this bloke read The Rachel Papers and/ or Money as a teenager and enjoyed it/ them so much that he revisited Amis when he studied English at university. He continues to rate the author, even though he is too distracted by boxed sets of 24, 2.4 children and the tedious administration of middle age to have read any of Amis's recent stuff.

Read More

Column: Dubai

Column: Dubai

Published in The Times, 2008

There are certain places that I would like to visit before I die, Tokyo, Mumbai and Havana among them. But, like grilled cheese sandwiches, I don't travel very well and there are many more places that I would rather die than visit. And, for many years, the city that has topped this list has been Dubai.

Read More

Column: Brevity is Best

Column: Brevity is Best

Published in The Financial Times, 2006

Last week I wrote about how I would rather eat my own arms and legs than speak in public and received two sorts of response: e-mails from people who would, similarly, rather eat (their own) limbs than make a speech; and e-mails from people who had recently endured a speech so tedious that they wanted to eat (their own) limbs out of sheer frustration.

Read More

Piers Morgan

Piers Morgan

Published in The Financial Times, 2006

Among the many initiatives Piers Morgan introduced at the Daily Mirror – the 3am Girls, the anti-war stance, the declining sales, etc – was a zero tolerance approach to pushy celebrity publicists. It is a surprise therefore that the PR arranging my interview with the former tabloid editor tries to insist that weuse the pictures they have taken and that we run a competition linked to a product Morgan is promoting. The cheek!

Read More

Jack and Suzy Welch

Jack and Suzy Welch

Published in The Financial Times, 2005

Of course, I know that Jack Welch, former chairman and chief executive of General Electric, is a big deal. I know that in his first year in charge, GE was America’s 11th largest company, and that when he left in 2001, it was number one, with a market cap of about Dollars 400bn. And I know that for four years in succession, between 1998 and 2001, the FT ranked him the “world’s most respected business leader”.

Read More