Stephen Phelan

TWO people climb a mountain, connected by a rope. They go up together in concerted motion, taking turns to carve out a path. If one falls, so does the other. This method is known as “alpine-style” – the purest kind of mountaineering. It has the simplicity of a proverb and it loads the rope with meaning. When Simon Yates cut the cord between himself and his friend Joe Simpson during their fraught descent from the summit of Peru’s Siula Grande in 1985, he was taking the only possible, practical action. The act itself was resounding. There were only two people on the mountain, but everybody heard about it.

ON October 11, 1996, a banquet was held in the Painted Hall of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich – a huge room designed by the astronomer-architect Sir Christopher Wren, its ceilings detailed with images of British maritime power. This was where Admiral Nelson’s body lay in state after it was shipped back from the… Read more »

AFTER his kidnap in Beirut on April 11, 1986, Brian Keenan did not see the sun for 1596 days. Held hostage by members of the fundamentalist Shi’ite group Islamic Jihad at various locations around Lebanon, he was eventually released on August 24, 1990. Blind Flight, the new feature film based on Keenan’s ordeal and that of fellow hostage John McCarthy – who was not released until one year later – condenses their experience into a screen time of 96 minutes.

DUBLIN is the one city where people know Roddy Doyle when they see him. It’s the only place he has ever lived, and up until his new novel Oh, Play That Thing!, it was the only place he ever set his stories. Today, he tells a true one from a few weeks ago. Doyle was waiting for a friend at Tara Street train station, and a bunch of little hoods were hanging around nearby. In Glasgow they would be neds, in Dublin they’re called gurriers. One of them broke off and came over to stare at him. “Are you Roddy Doyle?” he asked. “Yeah,” said Doyle. “So what?” said the kid, and walked away again.

CASTLE of Park is bright pink. It rises out of the Scottish countryside like a sudden blush on the green cheek of rural Aberdeenshire. Driving up through the grounds, I imagine that this place was custom built as a refuge for budding romantic novelists like myself, the colour acting as a kind of beacon to guide us over the hills in our heightened state of distraction.

‘AND God said, “Let the Earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed and the fruit tree yielding fruit” and it was so.’ Even in those first seven days of over-achievement it was a particularly nice piece of work. You could landfill a quarry with all the great paintings and written words that Man – one of God’s later and less perfect creations – has dedicated to the planet’s vegetation. “In all things of nature there is something of the marvellous,” declared Aristotle. “The Earth laughs in flower,” smiled Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ever since civilisation gradually dragged us away from the pastoral idyll where we all held hands, wore garlands and jumped, laughing, over sheep, people have been trying to recreate it for themselves.

MAGGIE Cheung is in the Leather Room. One of the three most famous Chinese women in the world – the other two being her fellow actresses and former co-stars Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi – she sits on an ornamental armchair, surrounded by red and gold gilding, panelling and drapery, in a theatrically decorative corner of Edinburgh’s Prestonfield Hotel. Conde Nast Traveller recently described this place as “so extravagant it’s like walking on to the set of some flamboyant costume drama”. Cheung has appeared in dozens of such movies, and looks as if she belongs here. But the actress herself has never felt that she belongs anywhere, and particularly not on a film set.

ON March 25 this year, the Scottish Executive drew a rough shape on to the map of the Highlands and claimed everything within that space as part of the new Cairngorm National Park. Same old place, slightly different name. Almost everybody concerned is confident that this invisible upgrade will enhance the life of the area.

WITH hindsight, I realise that I was naive when I set out to read all the novels on this year’s Man Booker Prize longlist in a single week. I accepted the assignment for reasons of intellectual vanity. Not even the great writer and critic Gore Vidal had ever pulled off such a wheeze, although he did once famously go through the top 10 American bestsellers and write a characteristically imperious essay about the experience. Now, it would be my turn to become a book group of one, a judging panel unto myself. I would read 17 novels in seven days. Starting the week as diligent as a librarian’s apprentice, I would end it halfblind, sad-faced and walking into walls, like a pit pony down a Chinese coal-mine.

AFTER a major heart attack last June, the world-renowned explorer Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes spent two days in oblivion. His heart was shock-started 11 times, but he remembers nothing. “Total blackness,” he said when he came out of it. “So if that’s dying, I’m a lot less worried about it than I was before.”