Christina Patterson: The one little problem with the royals

A few weeks ago, I had a drink with the Queen. It was in a lesbian bar round the corner from my flat. The Queen was keen to see the changes in my kitchen, and so we set off together on the icy road. When I woke up, I was surprised, and also disappointed. Surprised by the lesbian bar, surprised that the Queen could be so polite about some painted cupboard I ...- 12/01/2011, Christina Patterson

Letters: Criticism of Israel and dislike of Jews

I do not understand David Pollard's argument that it has clearly not been "a vintage year for the Wiesenthal anti-Semitic slur awards, if an obscure Lithuanian Holocaust denier and a moan from Christina Patterson ... have both made it into the Top 10 Slurs of the year" (letter, 27 December). The Holocaust denier in question is an adviser to the Lithuanian I...- 29/12/2010, Letters

Letters: Perspectives on Julian Assange

Contrary to Christina Patterson's assertion (22 December), the real revelation of the Assange-Humphrys interview was not the direction of Julian Assange's moral compass, but the sleazy depths now reached by mainstream British journalism. You could almost hear John Humphrys' raincoat flapping as he repeatedly pressed Assange to reveal the n...- 24/12/2010, Letters

The Year in Review: Bring on 2011

We watched, we listened, we voted. We loved the bugs, we loved the sequins, we loved the songs and we loved the power: the power to make, and, much more enjoyably, break, a life, a psyche, a career. - 24/12/2010, This Britain

Christina Patterson: How I was smeared as an anti-Semite

At the end of a long and exhausting year, it's sometimes hard to know what will hit the spot. A spa break in Thailand? A month-long marathon of black and white weepies? Or, perhaps, a little surprise. The surprising news, for example, that an organisation famed for hunting down Nazis has named you as one of its top 10 villains for 2010. It was on Twitter, th...- 23/12/2010, Christina Patterson

Christina Patterson: How a prophet of protest lost the moral plot

I probably shouldn't have laughed, but I'm afraid I did. It was the moment when he said that women had been "extremely helpful and generous". Being "helpful and generous" in WikiWorld meant, it soon became clear, a range of supportive activities, from the secretarial to the – well, I'm far too much of a lady to spell it out.- 22/12/2010, Christina Patterson

Christina Patterson: I always thought football was boring. Now I know it's rotten

Hillary Clinton and I have a lot in common. On Monday night she swapped her peach pant suit for a black one, and stood before the world's assembled press, or at least some of it, including the BBC, who were clearly at the back, because we could only see her in the gap between the cameras from more important news agencies like Fox, and said that she was so I ...- 01/12/2010, Christina Patterson

Blair vs Hitchens: The dress rehearsal

Christina Patterson: The Hitchens argument- 26/11/2010, World Politics

Christina Patterson: Here's my prescription for the NHS

Dear Andrew Lansley. Everyone seems to be making a very big fuss about a £100 billion bailout of a country that used to be a tiger and is now a drowning rat, but £100bn is less than your annual budget. A hundred billion doesn't go very far at all these days, which is why, even though your department was protected from cuts in the budget, and men I ...- 24/11/2010, Christina Patterson

Christina Patterson: Why we should be nice to animals (and people too)

If you're a less than stunning middle-aged spinster, your options on YouTube are limited. If, for example, you're a bit hefty, with bushy eyebrows and a lustreless mop of unkempt, greying hair and baggy clothes you may or may not have got from Asda, and an embarrassing dependence on your mother, and a big, big fear that you will one day be on your o...- 23/10/2010, Christina Patterson

Allison Pearson reveals agonies in writing her latest book

Allison Pearson, the journalist-turned-bestselling author, yesterday spoke of the depression that engulfed her while writing her second novel and the anger she felt at her book being branded as "superior chick-lit".- 20/09/2010, News

Errors & Omissions: Another distinctively British usage gets lost on its way across the Atlantic

This column does not go on about "Americanisms". Terms such as "loft apartment" do not drive us to paroxysms of nationalistic bigotry.- 28/08/2010, Errors & Omissions

What to Look for in Winter, By Candia McWilliam

T he art of losing" said Elizabeth Bishop in her poem "One Art", which serves as an epigraph to this memoir, "isn't hard to master". It's one that Candia McWilliam has got down to a (finely enunciated) T. Her life was once so enviable that a friend of a friend, she tells us, seeing a picture of her in a magazine, said "her life's so perfect even her wretc- 27/08/2010, Reviews

Letters: Council Tenants

I have worked in housing for almost 20 years, including some time in the US. The Government’s plans to remove security of tenure from council and housing association tenants are potentially disastrous. A means test or earnings qualification will be counter-productive. A similar system operates in US public housing and has the effect of dis...- 09/08/2010, Letters

Letters: Banks given too much credit

Hamish McRae extols the virtue of the City (4 August), claiming it is our biggest export industry and offsets around 50 per cent of the deficit in traded goods. There are four good reasons to challenge its true value. First, the Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese (BRIC) economies have huge, untapped markets and investment opportunities for local busin...- 06/08/2010, Letters