en-uk Tue, 30 Oct 2007 15:37:29 GMT Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd. custserv@timesonline.co.uk http://www.timesonline.co.uk Sun, 22 Nov 2009 04:27:39 GMT Newspapers 144 21 http://www.timesonline.co.uk http://images.thetimes.co.uk/TGD/picture/0,,116979,00.gif David Aaronovitch Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-11-16T07:57:47Z Forgive me first some snidery concerning our golden past, as depicted to me unceasingly by the army that laments the loss of the old Britain, and — using both the broad brushes of generalisation and the narrow ones of urban myth — paints its picture of a castrated, nanny-statebound, immigrant-beset, health-and-safety nightmare of a modern landscape. This too, friends, was happening in your ideal State: we were deporting thousands of small children, our own British small children, to the other side of the world, and then forgetting about them. Out of sight, out of mind, in that robust, superior time. David Aaronovitch Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-11-12T07:49:29Z On a sunny day Douglas and I stroll through a Russian airport, shooting civilians. If we don’t dispatch them outright with an obliterating head or chest shot, they have a tendency to crawl off, leaving crimson trails of gore among the spilt baggage, or to sit slumped, gently moaning, against the kiosks and seats. My pact with Douglas is that we’ll leave most of the shooting to the other guys with us, but he is young and impatient, so he finishes off one crawler when he thinks I’m not looking. Bam! Bam! Bambam! That’s one estate agent or insurance executive who won’t be seeing his family again! David Aaronovitch Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-11-09T07:44:49Z Not so long ago I was at a supper party about which I can give no other details than that the Cuban Ambassador and a well-known political industrialist were present. At some late, lubricated point between cheese and liqueurs, the captain of industry commended the man from Havana for his country’s imperviousness to such destabilising currents as democracy and individualism. Better stability, said the peer, winking, than chaos! I have heard the same thing, from similar sources, about China. It never, it seems to me, stops being said about the Middle East and Africa. David Aaronovitch Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-11-02T10:48:25Z On Friday morning David Cameron called upon David Miliband to apologise. On Friday evening I went to see a play. The play was Our Class, by the Polish playwright, Tadeusz Slobodzianek. David Aaronovitch Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:01:00 GMT 2009-10-26T09:11:04Z Overnight my inbox fills up with unsought mail. “Hair straighteners,” I was told yesterday, “are the new man-bag essential,” and that a “hitherto unknown Jacobean play” by Lord Edward Herbert (to me, a hitherto unknown playwright) has been found in a trunk in an attic in Powis Castle.