Christina Patterson

On Thursday, an 86-year-old woman met the Welsh rugby team. After that, she went to a community festival, where she saw displays by the local mountain rescue team, the Forestry Commission and Merthyr Tydfil scouts.

It's possible, of course, that Queen Elizabeth II started this week thinking she could stay...

The day before, they were eating ice cream. They were sitting in the sunshine, in the clearing between the pine trees, gazing up at a blue, blue sky. They were laughing, and joking, and looking, if they were girls, at the boys they liked, and looking, if they were boys,...

Andy Warhol would have been amused. Andy Warhol, who hardly ever smiled, at least in photos, surely would have when he heard about a woman called Samantha Brick. He might even have laughed when he heard the tale of how a woman almost no one had heard of became famous,...

"It is difficult," said the American poet William Carlos Williams, "to get the news from poems." In a normal week, he'd be right. In a normal week, you'd be quite lucky, at least in the Western world, to find a poem that talked about what was happening in the news,...

Asma Assad is very modest. "I am," she says, "absolutely clueless when it comes to fine jewellery!" But I don't think she should say things like that. I don't think she should do herself down. To me, it doesn't sound as though she's at all "clueless" when it...

Lady Gaga and Jonathan Franzen have quite a lot in common. They're both American. They're both famous. They're both rich. They're also both artists, and not just any old artists, but the kind of artists other artists want to be, the kind of artists who have millions of fans. But...

It isn't on the curriculum, but perhaps it's time it was. Perhaps it's time that teenage girls, who are taught the themes in Of Mice and Men, are also taught what to say or do when a boy they don't like puts his penis in their mouth. Perhaps girls should...

It can take a second. It can, of course, take much longer than that, but it can take just a second for a life to fall apart. For David Rathband, it took a few seconds for an unemployed bouncer to puncture his eyeballs, with 200 pellets from two separate gunshots,...

He doesn't have a hook. He does have a big, bushy beard, and eyes that don't look all that friendly, but Omar Mahmoud Othman, who's also known as Abu Qatada, doesn't have a hook. It's Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, who's also known as Abu Hamza, who has a hook instead of...

You don't have to go round it seven times, but you almost feel you should. You almost feel, when you go into what used to be the reading room at the British Museum, where Marx, and Kipling, and Orwell used to work, and hear the wailing of a human voice...

He mentioned T. S. Eliot. He mentioned Swift. He even mentioned Tacitus and St. Augustine. He mentioned Shakespeare. Of course, he mentioned Shakespeare. But he mentioned, unlike another politician last week, the Shakespeare he meant to mention, the one who'd actually written all those plays. And he mentioned a word...

When I first touched a silicone implant, I felt sick. It felt squashy, but not in the way a breast feels squashy. It felt squashy in the way that something like, say, a waterbed, feels squashy. It felt squashy, but it also felt hard.

When I looked at this thing,...

On Saturday night, in a cinema in Dalston, the audience clapped. They may or may not have clapped after the event that took place next, which was a "happening," involving live, human beings, and which sounded to me as weird as the outfits of the trilby-headed hipsters I had to...

She's one of the most powerful women in the world. According to TIME -- which is very keen on lists -- she is one of the 25 most powerful women of the last century. She looks a million dollars, and is worth several hundred million more. But there's one thing...

It isn't nice to want to punch someone who's dead in the face.

But, on Wednesday night, I did. On Wednesday night, when I saw a man called Steve say that he had cried when he'd read in a book that another man called Steve had paid him much less...

It makes you wince for their mums. It makes you, when you hear that they talked about their friends, who seemed to include the Prime Minister, and the royal family, and maybe the Pope, and maybe Jesus Christ, and about how all these people could prove very, very helpful, hope...

"You don't," said the woman with beautifully blow-dried hair, "win in life by playing by other people's rules."

What you need to do, she said, is to use your "unique advantage." Which, if you looked 'round the room, you might have thought was some very, very, very high heels. But...

If this is entertainment, count me out. If this shaky footage, shot on a smartphone, and posted, among the kittens on a slide, and dogs chasing deer, and Russian newscasters making unexpected gestures, on YouTube, and watched, within 24 hours, by more than two million people, is someone's idea of...

If I were a mother, I'm not sure that I'd be rushing to take advice from someone who went back to work seven hours after giving birth.

I think I might think that pushing something the size of a cat out of something that had struggled to accommodate a speculum...

It was, in its moving and sometimes funny way, as English as roast beef. First, the suburban couple whose dead daughter's hacked phone messages triggered this inquiry, as modest and dignified as grieving human beings can be. And later, the performance of his life from an actor world famous for...