I haven't had enough sex,’ sighed John Betjeman, from his wheelchair, when asked what he regretted most about his life. The bumbling, amiable Poet Laureate, dreamily enchanted by Miss Joan Hunter Dunn and her ‘strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand’, was actually a... Read More
AS I WRITE THIS, one of our little group of ghosts is boarding a flight to West Africa. Another has just got back from the Middle East. One’s in Scotland, another’s just popping over to work with his business school... Read More
A few years ago, I was commissioned to write a book about President John F Kennedy. Mine was the three-thousandth book on the subject, give or take a few, and I hardly thought it was possible there was anything new... Read More
There are 450,000 teachers in the UK, 236,000 doctors and 142,000 solicitors. There are also 55,000 authors. The teachers are overworked, the doctors are under huge pressure and the solicitors probably suffer in ways we can’t really imagine or sympathise... Read More
In Robert Harris’s bestselling novel, The Ghost, later filmed with Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, the ghostwriter hero leaves the haggling to his agent. He does a good job. The deadline, one month, is impossibly tight, but the fee for... Read More