My mother-in-law, Jane, will be ninety-nine years old in February. Her first forty-five years – working in the UK's Land Army during World War 2, engaged at seventeen to a man killed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, escaping a first marriage in Tanganyika to find a second husband in Kenya, widowed at thirty with an eighteen-month old daughter (my wife), rebuilding a life in England with almost no money, married for a third time to a man eight years younger than her – were

"Excuse me, Sir" asked the controller of the baggage scanner at the airport as he viewed a large mass of something opaque, "What are you carrying in your luggage?" "Soil", I replied.  "What are you doing in Rwanda?" "I am the dendrologist for Victory." That tends to be a conversation stopper so he shrugged and went back to his screen. In fact, I had tree seedlings in bags of soil in my suitcase for reasons which I shall explain...

The culture of swearing has changed radically within my lifetime. I was just 21, with a fairly humble job in theatre, when I found myself guarding the door against a mob of marauding paparazzi. They were intent on getting at Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic, who had just uttered the F-word on television for the first time in history. These days, while a new puritanism seems to be affecting young people’s actual behaviour, their speech is peppered with the F-word even without

If you were living in a country on a temporary basis, would you expect to be able to vote in their elections? I am pretty sure it is not a question many people have thought to ask themselves. They would have thought the answer was self-evident.  Nor are they likely to have considered the flipside of the coin. How many foreigners who are not UK citizens, many  living in our country on temporary visas, are entitled to vote both in our local and our national elections? Rather la