I write to you from Leipzig, a city I first visited 30 years ago when it lay behind the Iron Curtain. Back then, I needed a visa to visit,... Read More »

Farewell London, hello Edinburgh has been a persistent refrain in the UK finance sector since the Brexit vote. Facing the loss of their European passport, London-based firms are looking... Read More »

Sad, isn’t it, that if fell to Rod Liddle, writing in the Spectator, to defend Joan Bakewell for her comments on anorexia made last weekend? Where are the liberal... Read More »

On November 9 it will be 25 years since the Berlin Wall fell. The Wall’s collapse was preceded by a couple of months of popular unrest in East... Read More »

Sometimes fictional characters are not fictional at all. They are clearly based on someone real. Even properly fictional characters usually have some element of a real person in them.... Read More »

Last weekend, Dougie the Dug took my husband, Peter, and I to An Cladach bothy on the Sound of Islay for a couple of nights away from it all.... Read More »

So selfie is Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year, having, in the view of the esteemed lexographers, evolved into a mainstream term for self-portrait. Indeed. Only the other week... Read More »

Whichever side of the Scottish independence hilltop you’re on, it’s hard not to despair of the way the debate is being conducted. Quite a lot is being missed out,... Read More »

While out walking near Huisnis on the Isle of Harris on a particularly clear day last summer, my husband Pete and I caught sight of St Kilda – a... Read More »

The tiny beach-fringed settlement of Hushinish on the north-west shore of the Isle of Harris is quite literally at the end of the road. The winding single-track B887 peters... Read More »

Enriching, democratic and mobbed: the Leipziger Buchmesse, which takes place in March in Leipzig’s spectacular glass and steel Messehalle, is not to be missed. I travelled there with a... Read More »