Terence Blacker

The journalist and critic Terence Blacker writes a twice-weekly topical column. He is the author of four novels and his children’s books have been published in 18 languages. Blacker’s most recent book was the highly praised biography You Cannot Live as I Have Lived and Not End Up Like This: The Thoroughly Disgraceful Life and Times of Willie Donaldson.

Terence Blacker: Government advice by text? V gd idea

Your partner in life is having an affair. Your children ignore you. The last time you went to a parents' evening, your son's teacher had difficulty remembering who he was. Your friends have discovered that misery can be catching and avoid your company. Your cat looks at you with undisguised contempt.

Recently by Terence Blacker

Terence Blacker: The mad, mad world of the very famous

Tuesday, 6 May 2008

Two great knights of the realm, Sir Jimmy Savile and Sir Salman Rushdie, have just made our strange world seem a little stranger. Salman has appeared, nuzzling Scarlett Johansson's neck in a video to promote the actress's new single, "Falling Down". Jimmy has revealed in an interview that he was close friends with Margaret and Denis Thatcher, has been a confidant of the royal family and once accepted an impromptu invitation to address the Israeli cabinet on the subject of relations with Egypt.

Terence Blacker: Exposed: the world of grubby grown-ups

Friday, 2 May 2008

A mistress of the ambivalent, the American photographer Annie Leibovitz has a talent for catching a cultural mood in her portraits, while exploiting it at the same time. Her photograph of Demi Moore, nude and heavily pregnant, pointed up celebrity exhibitionism, but in an oddly flattering manner. Arnold Schwarzenegger, stripped to the waist astride what looked like a Lipizzaner stallion, managed to be both quasi-fascistic and yet oddly affectionate. Her latest portrait, a controversial semi-nude shot of the 15-year-old star Miley Cyrus, captures that moment of adolescence which is both knowing and yet childishly innocent.

Terence Blacker: There's more to animal welfare than sentimentality

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

It was, by any standards, something of a shock to discover that the British apparently care more about the plight of maltreated donkeys than maltreated women.

Terence Blacker: Season of renewal – and renewed anxiety

Friday, 25 April 2008

It has been a difficult few days: silence in the hedgerows where there should be song, followed by the publication of a profoundly depressing survey into the decline of migrating birds. But today has brought relief. The cuckoo is back, calling from his normal spot across the field from where I write.

Terence Blacker: Don't be glum! Here are ten reasons to be cheerful

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, founded by the chocolate millionaire in 1904 to combat "the great scourges of humanity", has been looking into equivalent scourges today. Having consulted 3,500 people, it has nominated our top ten social evils. They are the decline of community, individualism and selfishness, consumerism and greed, a decline of values, the decline of the family, young people as both victims and perpetrators, drugs and alcohol, poverty and inequality, immigration and responses to it and – creeping in at the No 10 spot – crime and violence.

Terence Blacker: Weren't computers meant to liberate us?

Friday, 18 April 2008

Of the publication of silly surveys there is no end. To help us make sense of an increasingly frantic and fragmented world, publicity-minded academics and marketing experts eagerly supply a daily diet of research documents and studies, usually with some statistics to lend an air of fake seriousness to the whole thing. They rarely amount to anything more than one of those mildly interesting, well-I-never stories on a quiet news day.

Terence Blacker: Winners don't always play by the rules

Friday, 11 April 2008

Of all the names one would least expect to find in reports of a controversy about sport, life and death, and America, that of Captain Mark Phillips would be a leading contender. The captain – "Foggy Phillips", as he was unkindly known when he was the bewildered consort of Princess Anne – has been out of the headlines ever since he retired from the royal family. It turns out that he is now a big cheese in American equestrianism. Coach to the US Olympic three-day-eventing team, he also designs courses for many of the sport's leading competitions.

Terence Blacker: The whiff of defeatism in the face of an old enemy

Wednesday, 9 April 2008

Imagine for a moment that a government body has delivered a report which presents, as one of four policy options, the prospect of your house being destroyed as well as your local shops, pub, village and landscape. It could happen within the next decade or so, the experts tell you, or in a century's time. On the other hand, the disaster could take place within a year. And, no, under present legislation, there would be no compensation.

Terence Blacker: When truth and its showbiz cousin collide

Friday, 4 April 2008

The shaggy media millionaire and poet Felix Dennis has just confessed to murder. In a newspaper interview with Ginny Dougary, he told of an event, some 25 years ago, when a man he knew behaved so badly and violently towards a woman and her children that Dennis decided to take action. "In the end, I had a little meeting with him, pushed him over the edge of a cliff," he recalled. "Weren't hard... I killed him. That's all you need to know."

Terence Blacker: A stunt that exposes the truth about corporate greed

Tuesday, 1 April 2008

How is this for an image which perfectly captures the greed, hypocrisy and downright silliness of the age through which we are living? A planeload of passengers flies from Norwich to Dublin. When it arrives, the travellers wait at the airport for half an hour and then re-board the plane to fly straight back. They are, in fact, not tourists or business people but actors, whose golden dream of appearing in The Bill has brought them to Norfolk's leading (only) international airport where they will earn £82 as part of a fairly obvious scam.

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