The Storyteller
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4th March 2024
Joe Biden came to Manhattan for a couple fundraisers last week, which gave the NYPD a fine excuse to close off as many streets as humanly possible, which is why some people go into law enforcement — for the chance to make civilians stand behind barriers — and there I stood, looking at York Avenue, abandoned except for a few cop cars, lights flashing. I’d crossed over from the West Side in a cab driven by a cabbie who’d been at it for 39 years and who was highly irritated by the blockages,... Read More >
Recent Articles:
26th February 2024
Spitting Image, first broadcast in February 1984, is famed as an iconoclastic satire of 1980s political and popular culture. Its grotesque puppet caricatures became so well known that they could cement a person’s image in public Read More >
19th February 2024
You only live once and once is enough if you do it right. I told myself this the other morning as I decided to have a piece of toast with orange marmalade because when I warmed up my coffee and put the milk carton back in the fridge, there was Read More >
12th February 2024
Twelve years after the Leveson inquiry and the closure of News of the World, the British press are having a reckoning on Netflix. Recent celebrity documentaries Beckham and Robbie Williams, and the final season of TV drama The Crown, Read More >
12th February 2024
The great debate continues over Flaco the eagle-owl spotted recently flying around our home on New York’s Upper West Side, a year after he got loose from the Central Park Zoo: should he continue to roam the city freely, feeding on rats, or Read More >
15th January 2024
It’s never too late to be polite and once you’ve gone that far you may as well be friendly. I come from Scots and Yorkshiremen who were suspicious by nature and brought up judgmental and were happiest when alone in a stone hut working with Read More >
11th December 2023
I ate breakfast with a woman last week who, in the course of twenty minutes, sent four cups of coffee back to the kitchen because they didn’t meet her standards, a drip-brewed cup with milk, two lattes, and a latte with oat milk. (Her name Read More >
27th November 2023
The world’s longest parking lot is Fifth Avenue in New York at midday and a week ago I found myself stuck in it, in a cab driven by a devout Sikh with headscarf and big beard, whose religion evidently taught him to Yield, so we moved at a Read More >
20th November 2023
Directors of historical feature films face a difficult task. How can they make the characters familiar to an audience without reducing them to caricature? How can they make sure that knowledge of the outcome – battles won or lost, empires Read More >
13th November 2023
October chill is in the air even when the sun shines and we count on this to bring us back to common sense after the delusions of summer. Back in August I was contemplating what to say when accepting the Nobel Prize in Literature and now I’m Read More >
6th November 2023
In 2023, to still be working on Beatles music ... to release a new song the public haven't heard, I think it's an exciting thing.
Not surprisingly, Paul McCartney was positive about the appearance this week of what has been trailed as the Read More >
30th October 2023
We Minnesotans believe in low-key. We don’t make a big deal about it unless it’s about our kids. And so one morning last week, when I ordered steak and eggs for breakfast and got a splotch of ovular grease and sirloin of Percheron and stale Read More >
23rd October 2023
Every day the naked American emperor stalks us, hollering in the hallways, screeching from the screen, demanding attention, and who can avert their eyes from him, his enormous hairy hindquarters, his baggy pectorals and jowls, his tiny privates Read More >
16th October 2023
I get the news from my wife, who sits reading the paper across the breakfast table from me and tells me what I need to know, ignoring much of page 1 and picking out the story of the Italian Jews who were sheltered in Catholic monasteries in Read More >
9th October 2023
The time I have spent looking for my glasses — over the 70 years since I got glasses in the fourth grade, it must add up to a couple thousand hours, roaming near-sighted from room to room, bathroom, bedside table, desk, kitchen counter, coffee Read More >
2nd October 2023
The birth of the spotless giraffe at a zoo in Tennessee, the only known one on earth, is important news to those of us who grew up as oddballs, seeing the spotted mama giraffe nuzzling her child, remembering the kindness of aunts and teachers Read More >
18th September 2023
In homage to my ancestor David Powell, I rode a train across Kansas heading for Colorado, his goal in 1859 when he left Martha Ann and the children behind in Missouri and headed for the gold rush. Kansas is a state of vastness, some of it seems Read More >
4th September 2023
One good reason to travel around America is to meet American people, all the more so if you’re one of them yourself. I went out West for ten days and rediscovered what I always knew, that our people don’t mind talking about themselves. You Read More >
18th August 2023
I took a ferry out of New London to the far end of Long Island, the end that is not Brooklyn, this week, which is a big deal for a Midwesterner, the ocean breeze, the big bass honk of the ship’s horn, the expanse of the Sound. It was an easy Read More >
7th August 2023
Moving out of an apartment, as I’ve been doing recently, convinces me at last to resign from American consumer culture and live with only bedding, one towel, two changes of clothing, a pair of shoes, and one suit to wear for shows and also to Read More >
24th July 2023
Michael Cimino’s magisterial, but flawed, Vietnam War epic was released into theatres only three years after Operation Frequent Wind, the chaotic Saigon airlift that sealed the United States’ fate and brought the conflict, for the West, to a Read More >
17th July 2023
I had lunch last week with a woman who is two months away from motherhood and it was sweet to watch her caressing the basketball under her blouse, patting it, lifting it slightly, mindful of this modest freight that will, she knows, change her Read More >
19th June 2023
I was an infant when Allied forces crossed the Channel and landed at Normandy in 1944 and none of my uncles were there. The only D-Day vet I knew was my high school biology teacher Lyle Bradley who dove into a foxhole under enemy fire and two Read More >
12th June 2023
Literary critic Edmund Wilson posed just this question in a 1945 edition of New Yorker magazine. He was being disingenuous. He didn’t care one jot for Agatha Christie’s wildly successful detective fiction and was irritated that so many did. Read More >
5th June 2023
O FRABJOUS DAY! CALLOOH, CALLAY!
The debt limit deal takes an enormous load off my mind; weeks of worrying about what we’d do when the economy crashed, and we lose everything and live on the street near a soup kitchen. But now apparently Read More >
15th May 2023
I salute the Hollywood writers who went out on strike this past week but I can tell you that we essayists won’t be joining them. For one thing, the essay is deeply imbedded in our nation’s very identity (U.S.A.) but for another thing, a Read More >
10th May 2023
Ahead of King Charles’s coronation on May 6 2023, there have been reports of a national shortage of bellringers. The UK counts 38,000 churches. The hope is that each will “ring for the king”, as the Central Council of Church Bell Read More >
1st May 2023
When you bang up your knee so it swells up like an elephant’s and it brings tears to your eyes to take a step, the orthopaedic guy gives you a knee brace to wear requiring four straps to be wrapped tight around the leg and hooked and held Read More >
26th April 2023
Each year, billions of pounds and euros and dollars are spent by towns and cities trying to entice big businesses to establish headquarters or factories or warehouses within their boundaries. It is hardly surprising. The benefits to the selected Read More >
17th April 2023
I went down to the Bowery one night last week to see Aoife O’Donovan sing to a ballroom packed with young people standing for two hours and whooping and yelling — I sat up in the balcony and whooped and yelled too — and what the woman Read More >
6th April 2023
When you look at the body camera video of Nashville cops, guns drawn, dashing into the school, throwing doors open, shouting, “Shots fired, shots fired, move!” and a line of cops moving swiftly down the hall and up the stairs and shooting Read More >
3rd April 2023
I am an old Democrat who’s been traveling around doing shows in Republican towns in the Midwest and it’s making me a better person. I stand up on a theater stage and I hum a note and the audience hums it back and I sing “My country ’tis Read More >
27th March 2023
We’ve learned something about privacy lately, namely that it doesn’t exactly exist. The case against the man accused of murdering four students in Idaho shows that cellphone tracking and ubiquitous surveillance cameras make it possible for Read More >
21st March 2023
I talked to a friend last week whose Lutheran church in Minneapolis is trying to attract people of color. Lutherans have been white for centuries, coming as they did from Scandinavia and Germany, countries that were never great colonial powers Read More >
14th March 2023
Believe it or not, I used to be rather cool. This was before you were born, probably, but I have pictures. I was aloof and enigmatic, unsmiling, and I liked the monosyllabic. Someone said, “It’s a beautiful day today.” I said, “Right.” Read More >
21st February 2023
The first James Bond film exploded onto our cinema screens way back in 1962,but a closer look at this classic can help explain the enduring appeal of one ofthe world’s most famous fictional characters.
On the 5th of October 1962, the James Read More >
15th February 2023
I couldn’t sleep last Saturday night due to anxiety caused by rewinding various lowlights of my long life that hit me like a brick, and I lay in bed and watched the hours go by as I contemplated my imminent demise, leaving my dependents Read More >
6th February 2023
The hidden art worth millions could change our perception of museums.
Recently, I suggested to one of my daughters we visit our local art gallery. It is a contemporary space in a former tea warehouse that bows to no one in its commitment to Read More >
2nd February 2023
The apartment across the hall from where we’re staying in Minneapolis is undergoing extensive renovation – walls being moved, floors torn up and every day last week the noise from there was seismic, volcanic, like they were throwing pickup Read More >
26th January 2023
I had a good conversation Saturday with a college student named Emily, a rare pleasure for an old man like me. Most of my social life is spent with geriatrics eager to talk about their most recent hip replacement, but Emily talked about her Read More >
12th January 2023
I saw the phrase ‘friendship recession’ in a headline last week, which has a musical swing to it, but refers to growing social isolation, particularly among men, due to people working from home, avoiding crowded places, being reluctant Read More >
7th December 2022
It surprises me, a man of pen and paper, that Twitter requires regular maintenance and without the attention of veteran software engineers could easily crash, leaving millions of twitterers to write notes on paper. And would they be able to Read More >
1st December 2022
I decided not to spend $700 for a seat at Music Man on Broadway though I love the musical and know most of 'Ya Got Trouble' by heart and sometimes 'Gary, Indiana' comes spontaneously to mind or 'Lida Rose' or 'Goodnight, My Someone', so it’d Read More >
9th November 2022
I’m thinking I should get to work on a museum of the era before the internet and cellphones and streaming music, so that people under 40 know what it was like to talk on a phone with a cord on the kitchen wall and gossip without your mother Read More >
19th October 2022
Here in the northern latitudes, it appears we’ve come to the end of the golden October days and soon grey November will descend and then some snow flurries, followed by an Arctic air mass. The next morning you awaken to find the driveway Read More >
28th September 2022
I look at the Great Milky WayWhile inhaling the autumn bouquetAt eventideAnd am mystifiedAnd simply don’t know what to say.
I love this September chill in the air. I love sweaters. They hide the age wrinkles on my inner upper arms. A Read More >
22nd September 2022
She told me out of the blue that she adores me. I was there, in a chair, listening; she was standing by the grandfather clock. She didn’t sing it, but she said it clearly. This should answer any remaining questions. But Mister Malaise and Read More >
14th September 2022
What if it does and they do?
Sea levels are rising as the polar ice caps melt and now it’s clear why Republicans are in favour of global warming, it’s a form of gerrymandering. It destroys the Democratic coasts and drives Read More >
31st August 2022
Spending some time at Mayo, much of it ordinary, waiting, listening, doing as told, but some of it primal, such as the CAT scan in which I lay on a narrow platform, hands over my head, and was conveyed into a narrow tunnel in the dark and lay Read More >
22nd August 2022
Life comes in focus as the day approaches
It’s odd how a man facing heart surgery hears from friends who seem to have more on their minds than they’re willing to say. “How are you?” they say and, “Thinking about you”, Read More >
17th August 2022
For some, death can be a smart career move. Quite how smart a move depends a lot on who you are and how you die. As we approach the 60th anniversary of the death of Marilyn Monroe, we can learn a few lessons about the art and implications of Read More >
9th August 2022
When an old man prepares for open-heart surgery, he maintains a confident demeanor and so does his good wife. He has an excellent surgeon and the procedure has been around since he was a teenager, pioneered by Dr Walt Lillehei of Minneapolis. Read More >
18th July 2022
A beautiful summer day, sitting on a porch in Connecticut, looking at boats anchored in the cove, grateful that I don’t own one. It’s one foolishness I’ve avoided in my life: most of the other numbskull boxes I have checked, and as I sit Read More >
13th July 2022
I have it on good authority that we now have 26 sets of personal pronouns available in English, including the gender-neutral zie, zim, zer, zis, zieself, and I expect there will be more to come since the spectrum of personal differences is Read More >
5th July 2022
The words you use say a lot about you. It’s obvious. If you say 'utilise' instead of use, or 'facilitate' instead of do or make, you’re sending out a signal to the world, consciously or unconsciously.
Think about it. It’s a lot harder Read More >
14th June 2022
I once knew a librarian who at age 34 fell in love with a poet she met in a bar who, though sober, announced that he adored her. For years she’d only dated men who were looking for a sympathetic sister, but this fellow lusted after her and Read More >
8th June 2022
Like the recording artists of old, Big Pharma is on the production treadmill.
Stockbroking analysts are like rock stars. It’s not only the late nights they put in, it’s in their production cycle.
The rock model is straightforward: time Read More >
26th May 2022
But why no Desert Island DVDs?, asks this writer
We’ve all heard of Desert Island Discs and most of us have probably, in an idle moment or when trying hard to concentrate on something really important, fantasised about being invited onto Read More >
3rd May 2022
Men my age are not riding high these days compared to back in the Renaissance or the 19th century, so I am taking a back seat and not getting fussed up. I appreciate new stuff like YouTube and the Unsubscribe option, and the peanut butter latte, Read More >
12th April 2022
The world is treacherous, my darlings, and if some ambitious person were to interview everyone who ever knew you for 10 minutes or more and offered them anonymity, he could paint a bleak picture of you that you wouldn’t recognise. There’s a Read More >
29th March 2022
I am alone in New York this week and I have double vision, so when I walk down the street, I pass identical twins who often are leading identical dogs and my loneliness feels rather dramatic. Double vision cost me my driver’s license and as a Read More >
25th March 2022
How cricket reflects our age.
A game of cricket is an extended narrative. It’s also an exercise in cause and effect. Luck aside, if you play a bad shot, you may be dismissed; if you bowl a bad ball, you will probably be hit for runs and Read More >
10th March 2022
Or how we make connections with strangers.
A male nurse did a blood draw on me the other day and as he tied the rubber strip around my upper arm, I said, “I’ve had this done about 70 times. You’re competing against some of the best and Read More >
28th February 2022
We’ve been sort of mesmerized by the Winter Olympics and dangerously thin athletes speedskating, one hand behind the back, taking the turns semi-horizontally, and others flying off a ski jump spinning in the air so as to give their mothers Read More >
7th February 2022
I was a lousy student in Lyle Bradley’s 10th grade biology class and he was wildly generous to give me a B-minus, given my ineptitude at frog dissection and tree identification, and since then I’ve descended into superstition and mythology Read More >
24th January 2022
I was in Clearwater Beach, Florida, the morning of the 31st, listening to coffee drip, looking out the picture window at a parking lot, and saw a squirrel sitting on top of a telephone pole at eye level 15 feet away, looking at me. On the beach, Read More >
17th January 2022
Freedom is a beautiful thing when you’re young, allowing kids who know they should be focused on the perils of global warming to instead be fascinated by the troubles of Britney Spears, but for an old guy it means a loss of direction as the Read More >
10th January 2022
Bruce Springsteen selling his music to Sony for a half-billion dollars has gotten me thinking about my music and what I might get for the songs I wrote when my radio show was touring the country, such as my song for Milwaukee (“Where men still Read More >
13th December 2021
Free enterprise is fascinating, especially for us socialist communists who want to make the world into a dormitory with a cafeteria where on Mondays everyone has mac and cheese and on Tuesdays franks and beans, and so forth, but with free Read More >
23rd November 2021
In this fifth chapter of his professional memoirs, to be published in six parts, Oliver Ash recalls how one of the greats of Paris real estate, Miles d’Arcy Irvine, helped shape his career in the boom of the late 80s. To catch up with the Read More >
22nd November 2021
Musings from one of America’s foremost commentators.
I turned 79 a week ago and I’m quite satisfied with the promotion. I celebrated with lunch with five friends at an outdoor restaurant under a canopy on a perfect summer afternoon and in Read More >
16th November 2021
In this fifth chapter of his professional memoirs, to be published in six parts, Oliver Ash recalls how one of the greats of Paris real estate, Miles d’Arcy Irvine, helped shape his career in the boom of the late 80s. To catch up with the Read More >
15th November 2021
Words embody more than just letters.
I have, until recently, been committing a thoroughly modern crime: putting full stops at the end of texts. My children alerted me to the transgression. A full stop is, apparently, ‘aggressive’, Read More >
10th November 2021
In this fifth chapter of his professional memoirs, to be published in six parts, Oliver Ash recalls how one of the greats of Paris real estate, Miles d’Arcy Irvine, helped shape his career in the boom of the late 80s. To catch up with the Read More >
8th November 2021
I love October and I hate to see it pass so quickly. My love and I ate dinner outdoors last Friday and it felt like the Last Time and as an old man, I find Lasts rather painful. I rode the Amtrak into New York from Boston, with that delicious Read More >
21st October 2021
Nearly 40 years ago, I was researching the life and work of a relative, the Victorian novelist Mary Linskill; daughter of a Whitby jet worker and jailer. To do that properly I had to become a member of the Whitby and District Literary and Read More >
18th October 2021
I am an orphan, which is not so unusual for a man of 79, and like everyone else I know, I work out of my own home. At the moment I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a bowl of Cheerios beside the laptop and a cup of coffee (black). I have no Read More >
11th October 2021
Imagining the ultimate scorecard.
Kipling, R.
Galsworthy, J.
Eliot, T.
Russell, B.
Churchill, W. [Capt]
Golding, W.
Pinter, H.
Lessing, D.
Naipaul, V.
Ishiguro, K.
Dylan, R.
In this summer sun’s season Read More >
4th October 2021
Saturday morning, walking around south Minneapolis, a neighborhood where – back in my youth – when your elders start neglecting their lawn, you might move them out of the bungalow and plant them here in a one-BR apt until they can no longer Read More >
20th September 2021
Maybe it’s just me, but I have a nagging feeling that my gender, which once was fairly successful – Jonas Salk, Saul Bellow, Lowell Thomas, Tom Jones, the list goes on – is sagging and sinking, uncertain about changing norms of behaviour, Read More >
13th September 2021
I was having a hard time falling asleep the other night because I’d thought of something that I was afraid of forgetting if I fell asleep, which was keeping me awake. Not that it was the sort of timeless thing you see printed on coffee cups Read More >
9th September 2021
In this very special series of exclusive articles for The Property Chronicle, Australian property legend Norman Harker reflects on his extraordinary 50-year life in real estate. He will pull no punches partly because, as he freely admits, Norman Read More >
24th August 2021
My favourite word today is ‘unsubscribe’ and I’ve been online clicking it on dozens of emails asking for my cash contributions to their battle on behalf of the good, the true and the beautiful, which one wants to support, but once you do, Read More >
19th August 2021
The fastest man in the world is now Lamont Marcell Jacobs of Italy, who ran the 100-metre dash in Tokyo in 9.80 seconds, and bravo for him, but when you peak at 26 you face a long descent into normality. You run that fast and you miss a lot, Read More >
4th August 2021
The astonishing Collin Morikawa was in the news this week, kissing the British Open trophy, something a man would rather not do with the Delta variant around, not knowing how many hundred folks had touched the thing, but he was excited, having Read More >
29th July 2021
Business and art go together like... Well, these days, the proverbial horse and carriage
ndy Warhol, a man who knew whereof he spoke, once observed, “Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best Read More >
28th July 2021
In this fifth chapter of his professional memoirs, to be published in six parts, Oliver Ash recalls how one of the greats of Paris real estate helped shape his career in the boom of the late 80s. To read or re-read the first four chapters of Read More >
15th July 2021
In this very special series of exclusive articles for the Property Chronicle, Australian property legend Norman Harker reflects on his extraordinary 50-year life in real estate. He will pull no punches partly because, as he freely admits, Norman Read More >
13th July 2021
It was a surprise to see an ex-pupil on Interpol’s Most Wanted list. I suppose I had assumed that life at a fairly decent sort of school in a fairly decent sort of place would cocoon me from the worst of the criminal element, but here he was, Read More >
6th July 2021
Staying with family friends in Chicago back in the 70s, I had an early introduction to a couple of the world’s great architects. My host was an architect and a lecturer at Northwestern University and the Windy City was for him a giant Read More >
6th May 2021
Master poker player Achilleas Kallakis used his skills to build a property empire based on fraud and forgery
Achilleas Kallakis was still in prison in the summer of 2014, when I wrote to ask if he fancied telling his astonishing tale. The man Read More >
19th April 2021
In a market economy, consumers vote with their dollars. The survival and growth of a business depends pivotally upon how effectively it convinces customers to buy its products over those of its competitors. But recently, consumers seem to expect Read More >
30th March 2021
The constraints of newspaper reporting helped hone the style of many great novelists, including Hemingway
Before they were literary celebrities, many authors spent time as jobbing journalists. Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Read More >
4th March 2021
John Fowles was a conflicted novelist whose desire to change the world was at odds with his chosen genre of experimentalism, and whose literary ideals were quashed by his hefty sales figures.
Every writer is compelled to write. They must be, Read More >
16th February 2021
This article was originally published in April 2020.
A writer introduces his three go-to reads – short stories by JD Salinger and Denis Johnson, and a volume of essays and reviews by Martin Amis
For almost every author, writing fiction Read More >
15th February 2021
This article was originally published in October 2020.
With this novel, Raymond Chandler transformed the genre from the simple whodunnit to the philosophical musings of a troubled, flawed protagonist.
Raymond Chandler’s novel The Long Read More >
11th December 2020
So, just as one is beginning to adjust to the reality that there will be no Christmas trip home to Britain this year, no family gathering under the exuberantly giant tree culled from a neighbour’s plantation, no bleary eyed brisk Downland Read More >
11th May 2020
You would have thought that more than 130 years after Conan Doyle’s gentleman sleuth Sherlock Holmes first appeared in the Strand Magazine and was followed by Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade as well as Poirot, Maigret, Morse and all the rest, Read More >
20th March 2020
The Final Episode of our Crime Thriller set in the world of property
Following the deaths of property tycoon Charles Rudd and his CEO Nick O’Keeffe in a sailing accident in Liverpool Bay, insurance investigator William Rohm travelled north Read More >
21st February 2020
Insurance investigator William Rohm has discovered that before they were drowned in a sailing accident in Liverpool Bay, multi-millionaire Charles Rudd and his CEO Nick O’Keeffe had been threatened by a vengeful crime syndicate, less than Read More >
23rd January 2020
Following the deaths of property tycoon Charles Rudd and his CEO Nick O’Keeffe in a sailing accident in Liverpool Bay, insurance investigator William Rohm has travelled north to sign-off their big-money life policies. When he discovers that Read More >
10th January 2020
After property tycoon Charles Rudd and his CEO Nick O’Keeffe are drowned in a sailing accident in Liverpool Bay, insurance investigator William Rohm is sent north to sign-off their big-money life policies. But when Rudd’s widow casts doubt Read More >
13th December 2019
Following the deaths of property tycoon Charles Rudd and his CEO Nick O’Keeffe in a sailing accident, William Rohm has travelled to Liverpool to sign-off the life insurance claims. After meeting Rudd’s company secretary Guy Danvers, Rohm Read More >
15th November 2019
After property tycoon Charles Rudd and his CEO, Nick O’Keeffe, are lost in a sailing accident in Liverpool Bay, Will Rohm has travelled north to sign-off the resulting big-money life insurance claims. Following a meeting with Company Read More >
15th October 2019
When two businessmen are drowned in a sailing accident in Liverpool Bay, Insurance Investigator William Rohm is sent north to sign-off the claims. It should be routine. But as one of the dead men is multi-millionaire Charles Rudd, a property Read More >
26th September 2019
Episode one of our new crime thriller serial, set in the world of property
Will Rohm was hoping his drive north would be fast and uneventful and that this case would be trouble-free too. It was a big-money life insurance claim but if he could Read More >
Featuring
Face to Face
In-depth interviews with leading figures in the real estate/investment world.
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