John Walsh
Prolific writer and commentator John Walsh contributes two weekly columns to the paper, Tales of the City and BTW, as well as writing features, interviews and restaurant reviews. He has been editor of The Independent Magazine, literary editor of the Sunday Times and features editor of the London Evening Standard. His latest novel, Sunday at the Cross Bones, was published in 2007.
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Recently by John Walsh
John Walsh: What's Marmite done to deserve this?
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Of all the bloody cheek. The nation woke yesterday to the news that Denmark's Veterinary and Food Administration has gone and banned Marmite from its shelves. There was immediate outrage. On Twitter, infuriated British consumers threatened to visit supermarkets and de-shelve cans of Carlsberg, packs of Danish bacon and tins of Spam (which, though invented in the US, is made in Denmark).
John Walsh: So that's how my taxes are spent ...
Thursday, 19 May 2011
You know that worried feeling you get, while looking through your monthly bank statement, that there are some items which you can't identify? One entry, reading "Comm. Od. Inst," or a similarly baffling arrangement of letters, will have cost you £91 last month, just as it did in January and February, but you still won't have a clue what it refers to. I used to lie awake nights wondering about the identity of something called "Box Clever," which for years had relieved me of £80 a month. Only when I cancelled my direct debit did protesting letters arrive, and I discovered it was a TV rental company from which I thought I'd ceased renting anything in 1998.
John Walsh: Mississippi rising, or the end of time?
Thursday, 12 May 2011
I spent last week with a river lapping at my feet. I was in America's sublime Deep South, researching a story about music; from Memphis, Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I drove through a thousand miles of Mississippi, the poorest state in the Union, and everywhere we went, the river came too. It wasn't just a conversation topic; it was the only topic – the river and how much it might inundate the homes of its inhabitants with its greasy, muddy, cold, brown presence.
John Walsh: This story has far too many holes
Thursday, 28 April 2011
I must have watched The Great Escape two dozen times, so I'm familiar with the methodology of escaping from a prison. I've watched Charles Bronson sweatily digging his way along, foot by foot, while Gordon Jackson and Richard Attenborough agitated a pathetic little fan to keep him breathing, and pulled sacks of dug-out earth back to the tunnel entrance on lengths of string. It had a gritty, not to say earthy, plausibility about it and I believed every frame of it.
John Walsh: Why the Queen will be among friends
Thursday, 21 April 2011
The organisers of the Queen's visit to Ireland next month won't be getting any medals for tact. Were they right to prepare an itinerary that takes Her Maj into Dublin's Garden of Remembrance with its beautiful statue of falling soldiers and ascending wild geese commemorating those who died for Irish freedom; then takes her down O'Connell Street, past the GPO where the Easter Rising began in 1916, and on to Croke Park stadium where British soldiers fired on a football crowd in 1921?
John Walsh: When leaders suffer a Lear moment
Thursday, 7 April 2011
As Laurent Gbagbo hid in his Abidjan bunker yesterday, waiting for the end, did he think it was all worth it? Thirteen hundred people dead, 130,000 Ivorians fled to Liberia, a million more displaced, blood-crazed gangs roaming the streets – and all because of a man who couldn't leave the power chair when his time was up.
Columnist Comments
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• Peter Popham: Butcher of Bosnia who saw himself as an avenging angel
Ratko Mladic was the terrifying image of Serb aggression during the Bosnian war
• Brian Viner: No one holidays quite like the British
You won't find a similar kaleidoscope of beach activity anywhere in the world
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1 Gordon Brown: We fought Aids. Now there's a new global crisis to tackle
2 Mary Dejevsky: Don't bank on the eclipse of the West
3 Peter Popham: Butcher of Bosnia who saw himself as an avenging angel
4 Johann Hari: A turning-point we miss at our peril
5 Brian Viner: No one holidays quite like the British
6 Letters: Perspectives on Israel and the US
7 Terence Blacker: Standing up for rabbits' rights
8 Julie Burchill: Maturity means letting go of ambition, and embracing the joys of invisibility
Emailed
1 Peter Popham: Butcher of Bosnia who saw himself as an avenging angel
2 Julie Burchill: Maturity means letting go of ambition, and embracing the joys of invisibility
3 Brian Viner: No one holidays quite like the British
4 John Lichfield: Note to M&S – Paris is pining for your sausages
5 Mary Dejevsky: Don't bank on the eclipse of the West
6 John Walsh: What's Marmite done to deserve this?
7 Robert Fisk: President's fine words may not address the Middle East's real needs
8 Johann Hari: A turning-point we miss at our peril
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