The Browser, I discover, is a website in the style of  a very civilised party - with no rushing or pushing and mostly polite conversation. One of the on-line tricks that we editors must all learn these days is to replicate in cyberspace the gentler...

'Civis Romanus sum' was the proudest boast any citizen of the ancient world could make, writes my old   friend Michael Gove in The Times this morning. It was a declaration of allegiance that entitled the individual to the full protection of the...

At 6.45 on Friday night the National Theatre crowd was waiting for the start of David Hare's play about the near collapse of capitalism in 2008. The Power of Yes was a hot ticket (thanks, NT press office for helping out) and I'd expected to be lined up...

For some years it has been impossible to get much beyond the second drink in an academic bar without a mordant joke at the expense of the RAE, the Research Assessment Exercise, a system whose name is hissed syllable by syllable, separately from the...

Frank Johnson was the funniest - and in some ways the finest too - of all the writers I ever worked with in newspapers Just as Harold Evans was the greatest editor and Hugo Young the most refined of liberal voices, Frank Johnson was the wisest...