Robert Burns is by some measures the most famous poet in the world. There are more statues of him dotted over the globe than of any other single person. He’s been dead for over two hundred years and yet his fame has not only endured but grown to cult status. Every year at the end of January Robbie Burns suppers are held all across the world. From Russia to Australia, from Brazil to Singapore people gather to eat haggis, recite his poetry and sing his praises. Many factors con

It is impossible to overestimate the influence of childhood experiences. I’ve come to realize that so many of the things I’ve done, so many of the choices I’ve made in my life were actually set in motion long ago. My trip to Vienna was no exception. The dream of Vienna truly began when our family went to see a movie. I know that going to see a movie doesn’t seem like something very special but for us, at that time, it was. It was the mid 1970’s and our family lived out in the

It was only by pure chance that I happened to be in the country on the day that my mother suddenly died. Shocked and bewildered, I arrived with my backpack at her now uninhabited house, answered the phone that was ringing off the hook and somehow never left. I justified my decision to stay in lots of ways but in truth I couldn’t face the thought of what would inevitably happen if I didn’t. My mother had died four years after my father and now the house was empty. How could I

These days visitors swarm into Dubai. Many nationalities don’t need a visa to enter the United Arab Emirates and those that do can buy one at the airport. That wasn’t the way it used to be. In 1994 the UAE was still a closed country. There was not a single person in the country who did not have a documented reason to be there. Dubai was not a holiday destination. There were very few hotels and most of those that existed had been built out of the need to accommodate business

The year was 2001. I stood jet-lagged and shivering in the cold English air. Around the corner a driver waited in a car. In twenty minutes he would get back on the M11 and return me to Heathrow so I could claim my business class seat on Emirates and finally get back to Dubai. But first I had to look at this horse. I’d already seen her X-rays. FedEx had caught up with me in Lexington, Kentucky. While the rest of the hotel had slept, I’d been wide awake reading films in my room

I know plenty of people who keep a food diary. They’re really serious about it. They record in great detail what they ate, when they ate, how much they ate, the calorie count and their emotional state at the time. I consider this an excellent idea. After all, as a great business guru once pointed out, what gets measured gets managed. Your health is important so it makes perfect sense to monitor in detail what goes into your body. Your body, as many health nuts pompously point

It was on a drizzly September afternoon in 2015 that I first met Joan Frost. She was soon to turn one hundred years old and I had agreed to write her profile to celebrate that achievement. I didn’t know anything about Joan and I certainly wasn’t expecting the vibrant story that filled the hours on that dreary afternoon. For little did I know, as we settled down for tea and biscuits, that I was about to be plunged into the glamorous world of the 1930’s British film industry an

I was born in Australia and grew up on a farm. In childhood I heard and loved the ballads and narrative poetry that was the signature literary style of the Australian bush. Poems were entertainment. They told stories about mad-cap cricket matches that ended in chaos, about bicycles gone out of control, about cattle drives and expeditions sent out to retrieve lost horses. Those poems rhymed. Then my family upped sticks and moved to Canada. The only poetry I encountered there w