My Christmas epiphany: life’s a gift!

My Christmas epiphany: life’s a gift!

It’s 30 years to the day since a fireman tried to smash my front door down at 3am. I was renting a ground-floor flat in a converted house, and while I slept, the two floors above me were ablaze. After being rebuffed by a woman, one of the young tenants upstairs...
Paper tigers

Paper tigers

Cynicism about the mass media, and newspaper journalists in particular, is hardly a new phenomenon. In 1928, Chicago newsmen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote Broadway comedy The Front Page, an instant classic that cemented the idea of the hard-boiled,...