• Sweetness is my weakness (from the Sunday Telegraph)

As Valentine’s Day looms, men everywhere are panicking. This is a day when the Englishman is called upon not only to declare his feelings openly, but also to demonstrate them with lavishness and taste. Money is tight. Options are limited. What is a chap to do? Answer: let the pudding do the talking. That’s what Fred Ponnavoy, head chef at Gü – who invents those impossibly indulgent chocolatey things you see on the shelves – recommends. And he should know. Firstly, he is a top pastry chef. Secondly, he is French. Read on the Telegraph website

• Pick a lock, any lock (Sunday Telegraph, 29th January 2012)

• Mother always knows best (Sunday Telegraph, 29th January 2012)

• At last: an Indian haggis (Daily Telegraph, 25th January 2012)

• Joyce’s Ulysses: the beginning of an epiphany (Independent, 25th January 2012)

Nine decades ago, on February 2 1922, Ulysses was born. It arrived in a handsome turquoise cover, its face embossed in gold. (At least, it did in Paris. In the UK it remained banned for a further fourteen years, on account of a masturbation scene.) Read on the Independent website

• Spills on wheels (Sunday Times Magazine, 22nd January 2012)

Saturday morning, and I’m in a sports hall in the shadow of Wembley Stadium. Two dozen grown men are swooping round an oval track on four-wheel roller skates, barging their opponents to the floor. Meet the Southern Discomfort men’s roller derby team. Buoyed by their first international game — last October they played the Quad Guards from Toulouse, whom they “beat handsomely” — they are now preparing for the biggest game of their careers. Against women. Read on the Sunday Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Review: Out Of It, by Selma Dabbagh (Independent on Sunday, 3rd December 2011)

At first glance, Out Of It, a debut novel by the short story writer Selma Dabbagh, seems – stylistically – more easy reading than literary fiction. It is set aside, however, by the weight of the material: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (Or rather, the Palestinian side of it.) Read on the Independent website

• Review: British Comics, a cultural history (The Sunday Telegraph, 17th November 2011)

Beano, Dandy, Topper, Beezer; Bunty, Judy, Jackie; Roy of the Rovers,Commando. If that delicious string of titles hasn’t warmed the cockles of your heart, then either you did not grow up in the UK or your parents kept you wrapped in a paper bag. Read on the Telegraph website

• Bedales School: does it live up to its reputation? (The Independent, 11th November 2011)

Bedales School – a progressive, co-educational public school in the heart of Hampshire – is well-known for its famous alumni. Lily Allen, Sophie Dahl and Minnie Driver were all educated there, and celebrity parents include Mick Jagger, Jude Law, Jeremy Paxman and Boris Johnson. Read on Independent website

• Hannah Arendt in 2011 (Prospect Magazine, 14th October 2011)

If Hannah Arendt—the great political theorist, critic of totalitarianism, and sometime lover of Martin Heidegger—had not died from a heart attack on 4th December 1975, today would have been her 105th birthday. Arendt would doubtless have had mixed feelings about 2011. Read on the Prospect website

• Get in the mood with rude food (the Times, 14th October 2011)

Of all the recipes in The Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia — a book of sexy cooking by the restaurateur and bon viveur Mark Douglas Hill — “Roast Iguana with Chipotle and Oregano Marinade” is the most exotic. The iguana, Hill writes, is revered in Central America as a “paragon of virility” and feasted on by libidinous Nicaraguans during their Holy Week. “You can grab an iggy at any pet shop,” he explains when my wife Isobel and I join him at home in Bloomsbury, Central London, for an afternoon of aphrodisiac cooking. “The tricky part is slaying it. My method is to put some Chopin on, feed the creature some beaten egg and brandy, then hack at it with an axe.” Read on the Times website (subject to Paywall restrictions)

• On listening to Life And Fate (Prospect Magazine, 12th September 2011)

It’s not often that Radio 4 clears its entire drama schedule for a week and replaces it with a single nine-hour radio play. Yet on the week of the 18th September that is precisely what will happen. The play—Life And Fate, with Kenneth Branagh in the starring role—is an adaptation of the postwar novel by little-known Russian writer Vasily Grossman. Read on Prospect Magazine website

• The Tolstoy of the USSR (Sunday Times, 11th September 2011)

Earlier this month, an eccentric Italian professor by the name of Giovanni Maddalena packed his pop-up Vasily Grossman exhibition into a van and set off on a road trip across Europe. It features a dense collection of video footage, manuscripts and — last but not least — life-sized cardboard cutouts of the writer. It has travelled from St Petersburg to Jerusalem, Buenos Aires to New York, and this time it was headed for Oxford, where a special edition of Radio 4’s Start the Week, dedicated to Grossman, was being recorded. Known for his monumental depictions of life during the second world war and under Stalin, the Russian writer remains relatively obscure. But Maddalena insists that he is in the same class as Tolstoy and Chekhov. “I am trying to spread the word,” he says. “Everyone should read Vasily Gross­man. It will change your whole perspective on life.” Read on the Sunday Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• First aid: do you know enough? (the Times, 29th August 2011)

It is every parent’s worst nightmare. Kirsty Bentley, a part-time teacher from Horsham, West Sussex, was feeding her two-month-old son Liam as usual. Suddenly she felt him go “limp as a rag doll. His skin was turning purple and his lips had gone blue. All I could think was, ‘Please don’t take my baby away from me! Please don’t take him away!’ It was horrible,” she says. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Review: Harlem Is Nowhere, by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Independent on Sunday, 21st August 2011)

In 1948, the African-American writer Ralph Waldo Ellison was commissioned to write a report on a Harlem mental health clinic. In the words of Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, a Texas-born, 33-year-old “walker, reader and gazer” now living in Harlem, Ellison’s report observed that “the general condition of life in Harlem is the source of the specific mental conditions of the clinic’s patients … second-class citizenship among black Americans leads to a general condition that is, or approaches, collective insanity.” Read on the Independent website

• Breaking bread in crisis-stricken Portugal (BBC Radio 4, 13th August 2011)

Listen to the audio (5 mins 12 secs)

A festival of bounty might not be what you would expect from Portugal at the moment. But the Festa dos Tabuleiros, or Festival of Trays – one of Portugal’s oldest and most colourful traditions – is exactly that. It has been held every four years since pre-Christian times, and the authorities decided it would not be cancelled for something as temporal as a national economic crisis (which, let’s face it, tends to happen once or twice each century). Indeed, this year, in the face of financial ruin, the festival was celebrated with extra vigour . . . The full story

• The puma-wrestling Amazon wild man (BBC Radio 4, 23rd July 2011)

Listen to the audio (6 mins 3 secs)

More than 200 years ago, the distinguished man of letters Samuel Johnson famously said: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Today, with mass transport and communication changing the face of the globe, that sentiment rings truer than ever. Despite the greyness, stress and pollution of the capital, a flash of international colour can always be found just around the corner. Read on the BBC website

• The Jew coming to terms with his Nazi past (the Times, 6th July 2011)

Ten years ago, when the President of Poland apologised for the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Jedwabne by their Polish neighbours, a controversy flared up. Much Polish public opinion supported the views of controversial Polish MEP Michał Kamiński, who opposed the apology, stating that “all of Jedwabne is being spat on and the entire country is being put on trial.” Most of the citizens of Jedwabne boycotted the memorial service, and the local Catholic church even rang its bells in attempt to drown out the prayers. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• End of the road: no more fares for Malta’s vintage buses (Telegraph Magazine, 31st June 2011)

• Why a woman’s place should be in the lab (Daily Telegraph, 28th June 2011)

• Malta’s colourful vintage buses bow out (BBC Radio 4 / World Service, 23rd June 2011)

Listen to the audio (5 mins 55 secs)

The island of Malta does not exactly have a central bus station. Instead, it has the Funtana tat-Tritoni, an open-air fountain in the middle of the capital city Valletta, which is home to a frenzy of bus-related activity. From early morning until late at night, fume-belching buses sweep around the fountain, picking up passengers, negotiating log-jams and stopping for the odd half-hour rest. Read on the BBC website

• Review: The Great Night / A Better Angel, by Chris Adrian (the Independent on Sunday, 29th May 2011)

Chris Adrian is big in America. As a result of his three novels and a collection of short stories, The New Yorker has named him as one of their prestigious “20 under 40″. Now, in an attempt to “crash-land him on to the British literary scene”, two of his books are being published simultaneously in the UK: A Better Angel, which contains nine of his short stories, and a novel called The Great Night, a work of magic realism based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Read on the Independent website

• Malta: the moment of decision on divorce (the Guardian, 28th May 2011)

Last summer, Michael Briguglio, a sociologist and chairman of the Maltese Green party, opened what may be a new chapter in the history of Malta. Angry that his country was one of only two in the world in which divorce is banned – the other being the Philippines – he sent a formal request to all members of parliament to propose legalising it. After a good deal of political wrangling, a national referendum was announced. As this article was going to press, the people of Malta were about to cast their votes. Read on the Guardian website

• From Our Own Correspondent: Malta (BBC Radio 4 / World Service, 26th May 2011)

Listen to the audio (5 min 17 secs)

“People came in ones and twos until the place was packed. Somebody closed the door to stifle the breeze. Then Father Angelo Seychell — a short, rotund priest in a spotless white robe — glided in, positioned himself beneath the crucifix, and began Mass. The congregation followed the proceedings automatically. But when it came to the sermon, there was an unexpected change .” Read full transcript

• Review: The Sisters Brothers, by Patrick deWitt (the Independent on Sunday, 15th May 2011)

Turning the final page of The Sisters Brothers, the second novel by the Canadian-born writer Patrick deWitt, the reader comes face-to-face with a mug shot of the author, an angular-jawed young man wearing a deadpan expression. So this was him, then. He was the creator of this unsettling, compelling and deeply strange picaresque novel. Read on the Independent website

• How to heal psychological damage — in disaster zones (the Guardian, 10th May 2011)

Perhaps it has always been this way. But it seems that we have been inundated with disasters – both man-made and natural – recently. Japan; New Zealand; Haiti. In each case, our TV screens are filled with images of rescue workers. Countless aid agencies are active, from Save the Children to the medical wing of the Israeli Army, delivering essential humanitarian aid. But what about the psychological damage? Read on the Guardian website

• Homophobic attacks: “there’s so much hatred out there” (the Guardian, 3 May 2011)

They’ve put him in a private room. Through the window, the London Eye can be seen turning languidly in the heat. On the table there is a jar of gefilte fish and a can of pickles; on the wall is a get-well-soon card from the Pet Shop Boys. A bouquet of flowers from Vivienne Westwood (who was turned away by hospital staff, having arrived outside visiting hours) is on the windowsill. And lying in bed, pale, bruised and dishevelled – yet nevertheless looking irrepressibly pre-Raphaelite – is the iconic gay socialite Philip Sallon, his extravagant black hair forming a corona around his head. Read on the Guardian website

• My big fat Humanist wedding (New Humanist Magazine, 22 April 2011)

If you’re anything like me, you’re not particularly interested in the royal wedding. Perhaps you have republican leanings, or you can’t bear the mawkishness of it all, or you disapprove of the terrible waste of money. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that this cloud has a silver lining – it has presented the nation with a golden opportunity to have some fun. Let’s face it, an opportunity to have a prank in the glare of the world’s media doesn’t come along very often. And the nation’s satirists and lampooners have been rising to the occasion with gusto. Read on New Humanist website

• Go north, young man (the Times, 18 April 2011)

Here’s a teaser for you. Of the following six countries, which will have the fastest population growth between now and 2050 — China, Brazil, Mexico, Canada, Iceland or Norway? I’d be willing to bet that your answer is wrong. But then, I’ve got an unfair advantage. I’ve just had a conversation with Laurence C. Smith, dashing Arctic adventurer and professor of earth and space sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I meet Smith over a coffee in Exmouth Market, Clerkenwell. His new book, The New North: The World in 2050, demonstrates a remarkable knack for divining global megatrends from the stuff of daily life. It seems this is a man to whom the world whispers its secrets. So a simple question first. When he looks around this room — this typical London room — what does it tell him? Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Out of the darkness and into the light: Ernesto Sábato, aged 100 (the Times, 16 April 2011)

As you read this, far away in the suburbs of Buenos Aries, a writer prepares to mark his 100th birthday. Unable to walk, unable even to speak, he is confined to what will almost certainly become his deathbed. But, still being in possession of a lucid mind, he is aware that this week his first book, which he wrote in 1948, will appear as a Penguin Classic in bookshops across the UK. It is a short, existentialist novel about the confession of a murderer, picked out in stinting prose. When it was first published in English, in 1950, it was entitled The Outsider. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Why kids should watch TV (the Times, 11 April 2011)

Last week my daughter, who is three years old, went to play at a friend’s house. When she returned, she was in a mood that can only be described as Satanic. After an hour or so, thankfully, she recovered. The cause? While I thought that she and her friend had been digging for worms in the garden, in actual fact, she told me, they had spent the whole day cooped up in front of the TV. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Review: Ours Are The Streets, by Sunjeev Sahota (the New Humanist Magazine, 10 March 2011)

It may be a little odd to open a review — rather than close it — with a conclusion. But in the case of Ours Are The Streets, a novel by the Derbyshire youngster Sunjeev Sahota about a homegrown suicide bomber, such a break with convention is called for. Here goes: it didn’t blow me away. Read on the New Humanist website

• The Bethnal Green Tragedy revisited (the Times, 5 March 2011)

On March 5, 1943, The Times reported the findings of an inquiry into a “London shelter disaster” at Bethnal Green Tube. According to the report, a middle-aged woman, “burdened with a bundle and a baby”, had lost her footing on the stairs and obstructed the entrance to the landing. An “elderly man” stumbled over her; within seconds “a large number of people were . . . completely blocking the stairway”. This caused a crush in which 173 people were asphyxiated. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Art from living flesh (the Times, 29 January 2011)

Remember that creepy chap in the black hat who used to make art out of dead bodies? He’s now looking rather passé. At the end of January, the Science Gallery in Dublin is opening the doors on Visceral, an exhibition of “bio-art” that makes art out of living organisms, such as home-grown chunks of human tissue. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• The God Instinct (New Humanist Magazine, 22 January 2011)

It’s not easy being an atheist. Your rational self informs you that God – or Zeus, or the Ju-Ju, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster – does not exist. Your intuition, however, often has other ideas. Read on the New Humanist website

• Sara Shilo: as Hizbollah’s missiles fell, I wrote (the Times, 8 January 2011)

Israel’s latest literary sensation was something of a late starter. Until 1999 she was a puppeteer in northern Israel and would have laughed at the notion of writing a novel. After all, she had never read one before. “I suffer from ADHD,” Sara Shilo explains when we meet in London. “As a child, I didn’t have enough concentration to read.” Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Cunning shopper: how to avoid stealth selling tactics (the Times, 6 January 2011)

Now that VAT has increased to 20 per cent, you’re probably checking price tags a little more carefully before parting with your hard-earned cash. The problem is that shops are fighting back. According to Philip Graves, author of Consumer.ology, a study of the psychology of shopping, retailers are using their knowledge of the human mind to turn the VAT increase to their advantage. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Tagged (Tablet Magazine, 30th November 2010)

If the walls outside the Nocturno café in Jerusalem could talk, they’d probably tell you what they already say. The area outside of the coffee shop is peppered with images and slogans that could only be found in Israel: a map of the country with the Palestinian areas removed; a soldier with the slogan “no legs, no problems”; a stencil of the national anthem, with the words changed (“the land of Zion and Jerusalem” has been replaced by “the land of Palestine and Jerusalem”). And, though Nocturno is a favorite hangout for art students from the Bezalel Academy, it’s hardly the only such canvas. Read on Tablet Magazine website

• Can dope give us hope? (the Telegraph, 9th November 2010)

Last week, the news took on a decidedly trippy tinge. First, Professor David Nutt, sacked as an adviser to the Labour government for criticising its policy on drugs, sparked controversy when he published research suggesting that heroin was less damaging than alcohol. The following day, Californians went to the polls to vote on a proposal to legalise cannabis. In a dramatic move, President Obama and his Attorney General, Eric Holder, threatened to intervene if the outcome was a “yes” (it wasn’t). Read on the Telegraph website

• Parlour games can bind generations (the Times, 4th November 2010)

I have blindfolded my grandmother. She is bent double in the garden, fumbling in the grass for satsumas. In my left hand is a thimble; in my right is a pair of socks. Family members are looking on and cheering.

The game comes courtesy of Parlour Games For The Modern Family, a new book out this week. Written by two Australian mums, Myfanwy Jones and Spiri Tsintziras, who have “four children and 20 nephews and nieces” between them, it seeks to prise us away from the internet and reintroduce the delights of collective silliness. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Want something? Then learn how to negotiate (the Guardian, 11th October 2010)

From spending cuts and coalition politics to the Israel-Palestine talks, it’s hard to escape from negotiations these days. But according to Stuart Diamond, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, university lecturer and former adviser to the UN, it’s not just the movers and shakers of this world who should be focusing on how to negotiate, it’s all of us. Read on the Guardian website

• Anything but hair of the dog (the Times, 7th October 2010)

As I enter the dimly lit flat owned by Milton Crawford, I am reminded of a bit of vintage P. G. Wodehouse. Rather like me today, old Bertie Wooster is suffering from “morning head”, having attended a “rather cheery little supper” the night before. In the blink of an eye, Jeeves whips up a secret drink involving raw egg, chilli and Worcestershire sauce. Bertie knocks it back and is instantly revived: “The sun shone in through the window; birds twittered in the treetops; and, generally speaking, hope dawned once more.” Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• How to survive an earthquake (the Times, 20th September 2010)

Picture the scene: a hotel room in London. You hear a noise like a train, or thunder, or a convoy of tanks. Furniture is beginning to vibrate across the floor. Suddenly things get very violent.

James Shepperd-Barron, professional survivalist, points a finger at me. “What do you do?” I get up from where I’m sitting on the bed. “You’d be flung across the room by now,” says Shepperd-Barron, before I speak. “You’d be slammed against the wall. A friend of mine had his gold tooth shaken out by vibrations in Indonesia.”

What I should be doing, I learn, is crawling under a “load-bearing beam”. Failing that, I should get into the corner of the room, or lie down next to the bed; bits of ceiling falling on a bed often form a triangular-shaped hollow beside it. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• How to write a novel in three days (the Times, 11th September 2010)

In 1977, in a bar in Vancouver, two brothers, Stephen and Tom Osborne, were drinking with a group of friends. The conversation turned to authors such as Voltaire and Kerouac, who were said to have written iconic novels in mere days. The whisky flowed. At closing time, filled with Dutch courage, each promised to return three days later having written a novel of his own.

Thus began the “3 Day Novel Contest”, the deformed left foot of the literary world. Over the years it has attracted a range of madcap entrants, including a man who wrote his novel up a tree, people who wrote their novels live on reality TV and a woman who twice — twice — entered in her final month of pregnancy. This year I decide to enter. Like most novelists, my output is ordinarily 1,000-3,000 words a day. Under the rules I have to write 45,000 words in three days. What could possibly go wrong? Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• The guilty pleasures of TV dinners (the Times, 9th September 2010)

Let’s not play silly buggers. You do it, I know you do. Probably more than once a week. Everyone’s at it, including, as you’ll see overleaf, celebrity chefs. Yep, there’s no doubt about it; eating in front of the telly is one of life’s last few guilty pleasures. And according to food critic Jay Rayner, it should stay that way. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• “Border Writer” (La Repubblica, 4th September 2010)

Portano i pantaloni a vita bassa, da cui spunta l’elastico delle mutande. Ostentano tatuaggi, strafottenza e cappellini da baseball, mentre dipingono un murale con un rabbino alto tre metri. Da una settimana, sotto l’incandescente sole israeliano, tastiamo il polso politico di questa regione attraverso i suoi graffiti e l’arte urbana. Da quando, cinque anni fa, Banksy dipinse la famosa barriera di separazione, sui muri del paese c’è stata un’esplosione di colore. Artisti internazionali accanto ad altri nati qui, opere sofisticate e creazioni amatoriali. Read full article

• Aristotle the swearer (the Times, 13th August 2010)

It is all rather improbable. In 2003, Annabel Lyon, a quiet 32-year-old piano teacher from Ottowa — she’s written two collections of short stories and a children’s book, but still thinks of herself as a piano teacher — starts to write a novel. It is set in Ancient Greece, portrays the coming of age of Alexander the Great, and is narrated by Aristotle. Yes, Aristotle. Not a stylised, “marble statue” Aristotle (as Lyon puts it); a base, flesh-and-bile Aristotle who is preoccupied with cunnilingus, dismemberment and buggery. Who, for example, compares his wit to excrement (“My wit was as dry as mouse droppings,” and “dry little droppings of wit”). Who drinks his own “warm piss”. Who talks in Americanisms and lavishes his narrative with profanities such as “ass-f***er”, “ball-breaking” and “piece of shit”. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Why has it become so difficult for us to make up our minds? (the Times, 2nd August 2010)

In case you hadn’t noticed, a much-hyped single called Choices is released this week. Written by the mildly irritating English-Swedish pop outfit The Hoosiers, it is a record-breaking 43 minutes long. As if one gimmick wasn’t enough, the band invited fans to write some of the verses and appear in the music video. But even though Choices is a pygmy of a tune compared with the iconic songs of previous eras such as All You Need Is Love, Purple Haze and Smells Like Teen Spirit, The Hoosiers’ new single might one day rank among them as the song of this generation. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• How to beat depression — without drugs (the Guardian, 19th July 2010)

Dr Steve Ilardi is slim and enthusiastic, with intense eyes. The clinical psychologist is 4,400 miles away, in Kansas, and we are chatting about his new book via Skype, the online videophone service. “I’ve spent a lot of time pondering Skype,” he says. “On the one hand it provides a degree of social connectedness. On the other, you’re still essentially by yourself.” But, he concludes, “a large part of the human cortex is devoted to the processing of visual information, so I guess Skype is less alienating than voice calls.” Read on the Guardian website

• Do the maths — for 5 million dollars (the Times, 2nd July 2010)

Question: what’s a million times five? No, it’s not a trick. The answer is the amount of dollars you could win if you solved all five mathematical conundrums in The Num8er My5teries, a new book by the iconic popular mathematician Marcus du Sautoy. The book is based on a competition set up in 2000 by an American businessman called Landon Clay. Five puzzles, $1 million each. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Israel’s most famous rapper (the JC, 1st July 2010)

Sha’anan Streett, the frontman of Hadag Nahash – the biggest hip-hop band in Israel – is hung over. And the waitress in the Jerusalem cafe clearly knows it. “Black coffee followed by a big green salad?” she suggests. He gives her a wry smile. “You know me too well,” he replies.

Then he turns to me, sotto voce. “Last night,” he murmurs, “too many substances.” He motions to his “f*** the police” T-shirt. “This is my own design,” he tells me. Read on the JC website

• Hug a hoodie? Yes, of course you should (the Times, 1st July 2010)

Hello, Jake, how are you?”

“OK.”

“How was your day at school?”

“OK.”

“Have you got much homework?”

“Yup.”

“What is it?”

“Oh, stuff.”

“Darling, is everything OK? You’re very quiet.”

“Yup.” Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Our big, cheap, green wedding (the Times, 25th June 2010)

We were sitting on the sofa, surrounded by glossy wedding bumph, when my fiancée Isobel had a moment of clarity. “These people are thieves,” she said, tossing aside a brochure for Blenheim Palace advertising two wedding packages – a no-frills option for £16,400 and a standard for £23,900. “We don’t have that kind of money. Let’s set ourselves the challenge of having a lovely wedding for less than £5,000.”

I smiled encouragingly. It was late at night. Within a few hours, I thought, she would recognise this idea for the tomfoolery it was. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Oliver James: it’s all about you (Independent on Sunday, 30th May 2010)

On my way out of the bathroom of a café in South Kensington, I collide with an unusual-looking man. There is something of the artist about him. He is wearing a flamboyant silk scarf and a capacious greatcoat, and peers through his spectacles like a character from a wartime spy novel. We make our apologies and I find my way to the corner of the café to wait for Oliver James, the esteemed clinical psychologist and broadcaster, author of such iconic books as They F*** You Up, Britain on the Couch and Affluenza. After a couple of minutes, I realise I have just met him. Read on the Independent website

• From Our Own Correspondent: Jerusalem (BBC Radio 4 / Word Service, 27th May 2010)

Listen to the audio (5 min 54 sec)

“Just ten minutes’ walk from bustling downtown Jerusalem is the district of Meah She’arim, home to the most inaccessible ultra Orthodox Jewish community in the world. It is a labyrinth of narrow, winding alleyways, and the apartment blocks are rickety, cramped and overcrowded. This is a poor community where life is dominated by religious conservatism and a dislike for outsiders. Enter this neighbourhood improperly dressed, and you risk being pelted with rubbish or stones, or even attacked with mace gas.” Read full transcript

• Personality disorders? I blame the nursery (the Times, 30th March 2010)

With some difficulty, I manoeuvre my extra-long double buggy — dubbed “the gondola” — into a room cluttered with plastic toys. The psychotherapist gets up from her beanbag to help me to fold it up. I introduce her to Isaac and Imogen, my seven-month-old twins, and then put them down on the mat. The babies, blissfully unaware of the therapist’s eyes, proceed to give the toys a good gumming. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• High noon in the middle east (Prospect Magazine, 18th March 2010)

“Netanyahu thinks he is the superpower,” remarked Bill Clinton bitterly in 1996, “and we are here to do whatever he requires.” Today, as the Americans and the Israelis refuse to budge on the fraught issue of settlements in East Jerusalem, this statement rings truer than ever. US-Israeli relations are at a historic low. But the current standoff is about much more than settlement-building. Underlying it is Washington’s concern that Netanyahu’s repeated gestures of provocation—like the establishment of Jewish heritage sites in the Palestinian territories—are drawing the region towards a conflict unprecedented since 1948. And this time there is a nuclear dimension. Read on the Prospect Magazine website

• I broke out of my orthodox cocoon (the Guardian, 13th March 2010)

The prospect of Britain and Israel going to war is an unlikely one. At the orthodox Jewish school that I attended, however, it must have seemed like a distinct possibility. We used to regularly debate which side we would fight for. Although steeped in religious observance, we had been born in England, grew up here, and developed strong allegiances to English football teams. We spoke little modern Hebrew and had been to Israel just a handful of times. Nevertheless, the feeling was unanimous: we would take up arms on behalf of the Jewish state. Read on the Guardian website

• There’s a third person in this marriage — Spinoza (the Times, 12th March 2010)

The people known as “America’s brainiest couple” met over an irregular verb. “It was ‘stridden’,” says Steven Pinker, regarding me steadily from beneath his mop of curly hair. His wife, Rebecca Goldstein, laughs. “Steven cited my use of the word in one of his books,” she explains, “and we started exchanging e-mails about it. You could say that our relationship started with conjugation.” Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• The British PoW who broke into Auschwitz (the Times, 25th February 2010)

Denis Avey, even at the age of 91, cuts a formidable figure. More than 6ft tall, with a severe short back and sides and a piercing glare, he combines the panache of Errol Flynn with the dignity of age. This is the former Desert Rat, who, in 1944, broke into — yes, into — Auschwitz, and he looks exactly as I expected. He removes his monocle for the camera, and one of his pupils slips sideways before realigning. It is a glass eye. I ask him about it. He tells me that in 1944, he cursed an SS officer who was beating a Jew in the camp. He received a blow with a pistol butt and his eye was knocked in. Read on the Times webstie (subject to paywall restrictions)

• The happiest men in the world (the Times, 8th February 2010)

It is a most unlikely scene. I am in an elegant sitting room in the Royal Society of Arts. Opposite me, sitting uncomfortably side-by-side on a too-low leather sofa, are an English peer and a French Buddhist monk. The contrast is striking. Lord Layard is white-haired, well-dressed and unobtrusive; the Venerable Matthieu Ricard is larger than life in flowing, burgundy robes. Yet despite their differences, these men have a common denominator: both have devoted their lives to the study of happiness. Read on the Times website (subject to paywall restrictions)

• Chekhov at 150: brilliance in brief (the Guardian, 29th January 2010)

“I’m crazy about Chekhov”, Woody Allen once remarked. “I never knew anyone that wasn’t.” Today, on Chekhov’s 150th birthday, that statement rings truer than ever. Much has been written about the enduringly modern quality of Chekhov’s work, and with good reason. He is one of the most frequently cited influences of contemporary writers, and it is possible to argue that echoes of his brevity, impressionism, and disregard for traditional plot resonate through the majority of modern literary fiction and drama. Read on Guardian website