When The Story of Holly and Ivy was first published, it was set in the Buckinghamshire market town of Aylesbury. In later editions the location was switched to somewhere called Appleton. (There is a village of Appleton in Oxfordshire, but the descriptions in the book don’t fit it.) Has the book lost something as a result? “And where does your grandmother… Continue reading
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Clever chef brings haute cuisine twist to plant-based meat
Avoiding meat and dairy is one of the single biggest ways to reduce a person’s impact on the Earth. But if people resolve to cut down on the meat they eat, or give it up altogether, how attractive, or even palatable, are the alternatives? In one New York restaurant an inventive chef is creating a plant-based… Continue reading →
Sobers six hit perfection at Swansea: That was the Day
53 years today, on Saturday, August 31st, 1968, Garfield Sobers became the first player in the history of cricket to hit every ball of an over for six. I was there and I wrote a book about it, Sobers six hit perfection at Swansea: That was the Day. Sobers was captaining Nottinghamshire that day, in a… Continue reading →
Is the court of public opinion siding with climate protesters?
An interesting piece in the Guardian by Peter Hain (Lord Hain, the former Labour minister.) He makes a strong case for a halt to all pending trials of Extinction Rebellion (ER) activists, accused of deliberate criminal damage in their attempts to highlight the climate crisis. Last month (April 2021) six members of ER, charged with… Continue reading →
Can rewilding call back the cuckoo?
The rewilding movement is burgeoning. But how much can be restored? Could species threatened by climate change soon be gone for good? Walk around my village in Southern England, and it’s a rare day when I don’t see the red kite gliding nonchalantly overhead on wide wings. I even see this familiar scavenger… Continue reading →
Poirot turns 100: how the Belgian ‘tec met his match in the desert
In October 1920 Agatha Christie introduced Hercule Poirot in her novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”. And the great detective lives on, in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Death on the Nile, which follows the actor/director’s Murder on the Orient Express. The film is expected to open late in 2020. 1994 I interviewed David Suchet on set during the filming of… Continue reading →