Column by David in The Times.

When I was about 15 I had a crazy best friend. He would go out on the street and tell people that the TV show Candid Camera was filming near by and then suggest that they act up for the camera. And they would. They’d go for it, none of them stopping to think that in Candid Camera the victims found out that they were being filmed only after the practical joke. I’d join in with these pranks, sometimes, always with my heart pounding, terrified at being seen through and beaten up. My best friend’s name was Ashley Baron Cohen.

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Book review by David in The Independant.

I am not really the right person to review John Updike. In the introduction to his 1975 collection of essays, Picked-Up Pieces, he set out some rules for reviewing, one of which is the exhortation that you should never “accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like”. Hmm. I suppose you could say that believing, as I do, that Updike was the greatest writer in English of the past century – greater than Joyce, Greene, Nabokov and most decidedly Bellow – does not make him a friend, and so therefore it’s OK. Trouble is, even though we never met, I do sort of think of him as a friend. When he died, real friends phoned me up to check I was all right.

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Column by David in The Times.

In a strange concatenation of the very old and the very young, the death of Henry Allingham, the oldest surviving First World War veteran, came on the same day last weekend as the opening of the Horrible Histories: Terrible Trenches Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, an interactive walk-through show for children based on the experiences of soldiers on the front line during the Great War. There is something pleasing in that: Allingham devoted most of his later years to ensuring that knowledge of the reality of that war was not lost to younger generations, and he would have been happy, I think, to know that the exhibition was full and buzzing with excited under-12-year-olds.

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Column by David in The Times.

I’m writing this from the set of a movie, which I also wrote. Not a great sentence, I have to say, for someone offering up his credentials as a writer, but there you are. It’s called The Infidel: it’s a comedy about race, about Muslims and Jews, and as such there was a fair amount of tricky stuff to negotiate in the writing of the script, but nothing as tricky, it turns out, as actually watching it being filmed.

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