Some years ago, I went on a "positivity" course. My sister had died, my father had died, and I'd had cancer, and a broken heart, and I wasn't, quite frankly, feeling that cheerful. Perhaps, I thought, I could brainwash myself into feeling a bit better.

And so in a central...

To the person who nicked my handbag from the Archduke Wine Bar last Thursday night, here's what happened next. Frantic phone calls, of course, on borrowed mobile phone, to police and bank and directory enquiries, for anyone who might know the one person in the world who has my spare...

Robert Harris is a very nice man. I know this because everyone says he is, and I know this because when, at his book launch - a launch heaving with political and journalistic heavyweights - I have to creep up to him and confess that I have somehow, mysteriously, managed...

Lovers," says Roberto Alagna. "We will be like lovers." Er, yes, I giggle, and even I can hear that my voice is just a little bit too high. We are in Giovanni's, his favorite restaurant in Covent Garden, and after much slapping of shoulders and kissing and cries of "Roberto!"...

It takes a certain kind of genius to take a four-and-a-half-hour Handel opera, traditionally sung by castrati, with a tortuously complicated plot and a Roman emperor played by a middle-aged matron, to stick it in front of a woman who still has no idea what happens in Cosi fan tutte,...

If Alan Duncan and his ilk think it's tough to be a politician, they might give some thought to Morgan Tsvangirai. Put the 51-year-old son of a wing commander, who has made millions out of oil, in a room with the 57-year-old son of a bricklayer, who spent 10 years...

When I was 13, I was obsessed with fashion. I spent boring car journeys with my boring family dreaming of the outfits I would save up for and acquire, the outfits that would shock and dazzle the world into knowing that I was someone.

Sometimes, I'd knock them up myself:...

Clive James is giving a good impression of someone who does not hate being interviewed. He has charmed the photographer with a stream of self-deprecatory jokes and now it's my turn -- my turn for the wit, erudition and glittering intelligence of the man The New Yorker once described as...

Fighting on the frontline is tricky, of course, but if you want real stress, try working for the MoD. Actually, if you want real stress, just try speaking to them. When I last phoned them up, about casualty figures in Iraq, I thought I was going to explode.

It's...

"It is difficult," said an official report to the director of the Australian Trade Commissioner Service, "to support the appointment of women." It was difficult, apparently, because although a "relatively young, attractive woman could operate with some effectiveness in a subordinate capacity," the appointee "would not stay young and attractive...

If you want to feel young and gorgeous, don't interview Rankin. Ten minutes in the gleaming glass block in north London that doubles as studio, office and world headquarters of Rankin Inc (or some metaphorical equivalent) is enough to make me feel like a wizened maiden aunt. All around me,...

On Monday night, a contemporary sex symbol celebrated the life and loves of a spiritual brother. Byron, said Rupert Everett in a Channel 4 film, In Search of Byron, was "the first modern sex symbol", the "first international celebrity" and "one of the earliest practitioners of PR". He was also...

When I was 14, my mother bought me a book called A Year of Beauty and Health. Boy, did she regret it. That year, no one else in the Patterson household saw much of the bathroom. They didn't see much of the kitchen either, as I eschewed my mother's Smash...

The year before its second nuclear tests, the world's largest democracy hurled a bomb onto the international stage. At first, people didn't realize it was a bomb. It was tiny, looked harmless and took a while to explode. But explode it did and the world's largest democracy is still reeling....

Just occasionally, in the litany of bad news about the economy, and bad news about the government, and bad news about the environment, and bad news about the general collapse of everything all the time, you hear something that makes you want to cheer. For me that moment came yesterday...

"You know what," said a banker to me the other day, "I think they should pay me about half what I earn." For a moment, he had the thunderstruck expression of someone whose casual yawn has turned into a giant burp, and who's not quite sure how to handle the...

I was in a monastery in Syria when I heard that Michael Jackson had died. "What a shame!" I thought. "What a sad life!" And then I went back to looking at icons. (The kind of icons that feature a Madonna and child -- I mean, a real Madonna and...

There are certain moments in a job that you'll always remember. One of mine was the day I logged on to the website of the organisation I was running, to find it had disappeared. In place of thousands of pages of information about poetry, education projects and events, there were...

Carlos Acosta stretches out on the sofa and yawns. Not the most promising start to an interview, perhaps -- or indeed the most flattering response from the man sometimes called the Cuban Sex Missile -- but I can see why he's tired. He's been up with the lark, or at...

"I was beginning to believe," says Benjamin Zephaniah, "that I was a mindless drugs freak." He looks pained as he says it, but this isn't a confession. Squashed between the telly and the sofa in Arthur Smith's front room, he's performing his poem "Rong Radio." Upstairs, the comedian Stephen K....