All articles on this site

  • My book launch

  • Gilbert on Radio 4

  • Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

  • Whateverman

  • You murdered me — Rachel Cusk’s ‘Arlington Park’

  • Sweet Bird Of Disaster

  • BBC London News Debate

    I was a guest on Thursday night on BBC London News, talking about whether children between the ages of 10-14 should be put in prison. The other guest was Enver Solomon, the Deputy Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. He was arguing that children should be given therapy instead of being punished. […]

  • Education failures are a national tragedy

    Finally, the trousers are coming off the Government’s education policies. The news that teenager Paul Erhahon, who was murdered by a gang of youths last Friday in a quiet London suburb, had suffered an earlier knife attack at school has, together with other teenage stabbings and murders, offered a glimpse of the sordid underbelly of […]

  • The School’s Lottery

    The concept of choice has long supposed to be one of the central plans of the Government’s education policy. Over the last decades, Tony Blair and a succession of Labour education secretaries have trumpetted their commitment to increased parental power over schools admissions. So in a much hyped speech in 2005, the Prime Minister heralded […]

  • Readings and parties

    On Saturday and Sunday night, there were two major parties for the festival. Saturday’s party was hosted by GQ and Wasafiri,

  • The Limbs of Shiva — Elephanta Island

    I was told that it wasn’t safe to drink coca-cola because the monkeys would swoop down and snatch it out of my hand. I chucked my can in the bin, and followed my guide in the Elephanta caves. I had spent an hour on the boat, feeling the cool breeze against my forehead, and looking […]

  • My Talk — Saturday

    Blake Morrison raises his eyes to the heavens as he looks at the title to my event over breakfast. So you’re speaking about the role of the writer, are you Francis? That shouldn’t take long to sort out,’ he says with a wry smile. Blake is a renowned poet, whose anthology of British Poetry in […]

  • First Day in Mumbai

    The drilling next door made the whole of my hotel room vibrate. I immediately regretted not buying the long, deep earplugs I saw at the airport. I had slept for three hours and I knew now that that was my lot. And yet, I didn’t know where to go next. Fortunately, Sunita, an organiser from […]

  • The Buddha in Colombo

    The Buddha looked down at me in the murky temple. Nirpal Dhaliwal, a fellow writer going to speak at the Kitab Festival with me, explained that this was a good religion, a gentle religion, one that didn’t specialise in making you feel bad about yourself. I looked at the elephant munching at the sticks of […]

  • How Jamie and school meal fascists turn kids into junk food addicts

    Her words are enough to make Jamie Oliver tear his hair out. Joanne, 14, a pupil at a large comprehensive in London, is sucking her Triple Power Push Pop as she explains to me why she insists on stuffing her mouth with such sweets. "I don’t buy any of the stuff in the canteen, it’s […]

  • That’ll learn ’em

    SEVEN KINGS by Fran Abrams Atlantic Books, £9.99; 272pp THE HAPLESS TEACHER’S HANDBOOK by Phil Ball Ebury Press, £10.99; 320pp IT’S YOUR TIME YOU’RE WASTING : A Teacher’s Tales of Classroom Hell by Frank Chalk Monday Books, £7.99; 226pp DOES SCHOOL REALLY make a difference? Do all those thousands of hours of children sitting in […]

  • A pub crawl worth toasting

    IT IS A SUCH A beautifully simple idea that I am surprised no one has thought of it before — to travel from the southern-most point of Britain to the most northerly sampling as many pubs as possible in between. Ian Marchant has written a digressive diary describing a delicious, drunken romp across Britain during […]

  • Hey kids, leave that teacher alone

    As a teacher, I felt distinctly uncomfortable watching Channel 4’s new show, The Law of the Playground. But maybe that’s the point. This seven-part series is about all the stuff a phalanx of trendily dressed, tedious twenty and thirtysomethings got up to at school: the silly pranks, the mindless nicknames, the cruel imitations, the ritualised […]

  • Sorry Mr Reid, we’ve every damn right to moan

    You might expect John Reid to know a lot about the vile culture of violence that has disfigured our country and made it feel less safe than at any time in living memory. Parts of the Home Secretary’s constituency on the eastern edge of Glasgow are notorious. Gangs of adolescent louts with knives have created […]

  • The Green Moss Code

    He was staring at me, his face emerging from the rock, his cheeks covered in silky moss, his lips puckered green and glistening, his eyes sad and tearful. I stared back him at him, amazed. I hadn’t expected this. I hadn’t expected to go on what I felt would be a mundane tramp around the […]

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