Columnists

Will Self

PsychoGeography: Olympic hurdles - Richard Ford, the American writer, asserts through the eponymous hero of his novel The Sportswriter that the trouble with professional sportsmen - and women - is that they're incredibly boring people.

Inside Columnists

Dylan Jones: If you ask me

Saturday, 10 May 2008

If you ask me, this year's furore over China hosting the Olympics hasn't even properly begun. We all expected there to be demonstrations interrupting the tour of the Torch, but I don't think many of us expected so many anti-Western outbursts by indignant Chinese. In the last few weeks, millions of young Chinese people (many of them students) have been signing online petitions expressing their anger at the Western media's support for Tibetan independence.

The Weasel: From Canton to Croydon

Saturday, 10 May 2008

Since the Weasel's research budget for this special issue on China did not stretch to a business class return to Shanghai, I settled for Croydon. No 544 Purley Way may seem an unlikely spot to plumb the mysteries of the Orient, but my friend Malcolm maintains that a visit here is "like a little holiday". It's not every address on the periphery of south London that boasts a massive pagoda-style entrance arch decorated with dragons in green porcelain. Inside, you find more quasi-Chinese architecture housing a number of Asian restaurants, but a utilitarian structure of corrugated aluminium just visible behind the pyramid of roofs was the real goal of our (very) short-haul journey.

Brian Viner: The naked truth about football, not a pretty picture

Saturday, 10 May 2008

Far be it for this column to blow its own trumpet, but here goes anyway. On 11 August last year, on the opening day of the Premier League season, it began thus: "You don't have to be Nostradamus, or even Eileen Drewery, to predict what is going to happen in the Premier League season, which begins today with no certainties except that Manchester United will win it, Chelsea will finish second, Arsenal will finish third and Liverpool fourth. That I know this before the season kicks off is of course dispiriting beyond belief, and means that as a source of excitement I must already focus on the relegation battle: any three from Derby County, Wigan, Birmingham City, Fulham, Reading and Sunderland."

John Walsh: btw

Saturday, 10 May 2008

We may resent The Rough Guide to England's description of us as "overweight, binge-drinking, reality TV addicts," but we are shocking martyrs to alcohol-related incapacitation. According to a survey of 1,000 employees by Norwich Union Healthcare, one in three workers admits going to work with a sore head and a pack of painkillers, while more than one in 10 say they've been drunk at their desks. Not surprisingly, most al desko drunkards said it affected their performance. IT departments are, it seems, the most abstemious, businessmen and building industry folk score twice the average for workplace bleariness but top of the scale are media and creative people, 41 per cent of whom said they've tried to work while sloshed. I suppose that may explain the current state of ITV ...

Richard Ingrams' Week: 'Institutional failure' is the curse of our times

Saturday, 10 May 2008

It is unfortunate that Ant and Dec, about whom I wrote last week, should now find themselves involved in yet another unseemly controversy involving their television show.

David Lister: The Week in Arts

Saturday, 10 May 2008

There is an illness that afflicts leading lights in the arts, an illness that you rarely encounter elsewhere. I call it "cultural paranoia". It involves major celebrities taking popular and populist stances, and then convincing themselves that they are being persecuted for doing so. Vanessa Redgrave suffered from this debilitating disease for several decades. And this week the celebrated actor Mark Rylance appeared to be showing symptoms.

Thomas Sutcliffe: Spare me this theatrical piety

Friday, 9 May 2008

Sitting in the Lyttelton Theatre the other day, watching the first night of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I was momentarily distracted from what was happening in front of me by something going on behind me, namely an audible mutter of rebuke from one theatre-goer at the noisy bronchial honking of another. I don't know whether Vanessa Redgrave noticed, up on stage, but quite a lot of the rest of us did – and I'm told the offending party issued not a peep or a snort for the rest of the performance – embarrassment having effected a mucosal clearage that repeated coughing could not.

Tracey Emin: My Life In A Column

Friday, 9 May 2008

I am lying on my bed. It's rock hard and slightly bumpy and the pillows are very flat and combobulated.

Pandora: Pall Mall's bad day in Basra

Friday, 9 May 2008

Smoke and the crump of mortars drift from Pall Mall on the warm evening river breeze, following the eruption of Iraq-style hostilities at the customarily sedate Oxford and Cambridge Club. An awards ceremony to promote peace in the Middle East descended into unhelpful fist-throwing when the final gong, for "cutting edge" journalism from the region, went to a female Iraqi hack flown in especially from Basra. "The bloke presenting was Iraqi and starting arguing with someone in the audience," says Pandora's lass in the pearl necklace. "He called him a thug and a murderer because of a past association with Saddam's regime. The guest did not take this sitting down, it went right off. The host had to wind things up over the marquise au chocolat before blows landed."

Miles Kington Remembered: Passive suffering: an extraordinary legal precedent

Friday, 9 May 2008

A most extraordinary case is going on in the High Court at the moment, which seeks to create a new offence called "passive suffering". Here is an extract from yesterday's enlightening proceedings...

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