Remotely Interesting

Nothing pleases me more than to bring up the subject of death at a dinner party.

I know little about the hierarchy at work among those for whom the vulgar charm of the theatre and the cheap whimsy of television is somehow an acceptable career choice.

Travelling in Kurdistan in the early 1920s - at the best of times - was hazardous.

The best way to evaluate the success or failure of your life is to imagine how it might look on television.

In the 1990s the Skynet Funding Bill was passed.

Who knew?

I like to think of myself as one of those well-fed, rubicund burghers one sees in old Dutch pictures: my stout, ruddy-cheeked, cheerful wife laughing uproariously by my side as I drink heartily from a carafe of wine, while a tiny crumb from a freshly baked loaf falls from my fat, wet, full pink lips, and gets lost in the moist, seldom-washed crevice that has developed between two of my chins and my upper chest area.

Consider for a moment, if you will, the fashion sense of the modern criminal.

Rampant drug abuse is the new black for troubled cops in crime dramas.

It could have been caused by a change in my medication, or perhaps by a joke played on me by my house boy Juan: whatever the reason, I came to my senses last Saturday eve in a rather rough hotel near the port.

The Christmas and holiday period for most, let's make no bones about it, is the most harrowing and cheerless of the year.

I know I should not have allowed myself to be dragged into the situation.

The Dark Ages was a time cheerfully bereft of the complex, almost metaphysical questions television production has introduced to bewilder mankind.

It struck me recently how much-changed are the woman-folk of today, compared with the days of my youth.

Nazis on film and television are not generally presented in a sympathetic manner.

Some things are naturally creepy, and can make a horror movie scary by their very inclusion.

Anyone who, like myself, was already well into their twilight years when the 1960s broke tiresomely on mankind, will remember what terribly backward steps many of the ideas of that decade were.

In the chronicles of stirring events, grand adventures and honest to goodness derring-do, John F. Kennedy has an exalted place.

The best documentaries are those that leave you not with a feeling of certainty you understand the topic that has taken your attention for the last hour or so.