Another beautiful day in Soho. To Blacks in Dean Street for lunch with John Wilmott. John founded – with his brother Eamonn – Internet Publishing which became Online Magic and, after the business’ acquisition by ad giant Omnicom, Agency.com. John is a thoughtful bridge fanatic. He’s working on a new project.

Throwing out the self-promotional boom a bit further today – to take in my wife Juliet’s latest column at Tigerchild. Juliet’s been writing her funny and frank weekly accounts of life in the parenting trenches (Planet Parent) for about a year now but I reckon her latest is one of the funniest. You can usually…

Those who doubt that we should continue sending people into space have a point – but only in the short term. As soon as you stretch the time scale out beyond, say, fifty years it becomes clear: freezing the manned space programme now would be an enormous vanity, a betrayal of future generations on a…

The Guardian ran an extract from Susan Sontag’s new book ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ (itself an edited version of a New Yorker article – how’s that for repurposing?). Sontag is an icon of a certain kind of politicised thinking about culture. So she’s come in for a lot of knee-jerk demonisation as the intellectual…

By train to Farringdon, then a beautiful walk through the City – past Smithfield and St Paul’s, through Postman’s Park – to meet Michael Thompson, a partner at Steptoe and Johnson, a big City law firm. Michael was the man we relied on to burn the midnight oil on another.com‘s various deals, fund raisings and…