Authors Electric

How do you like to relax when you're not writing? I love watching the cookery programmes on telly. Masterchef has just started again, James Martin's Saturday Morning programme gets recorded so I can watch it at some point on a Sunday; and the Great British Bake Off and the Great British Menu are all compelling programmes as far as I'm concerned. The amount of cooking programmes I watch you'd think would be turning me into a super adventurous cook, but no, I just like watching and seeing how the experts can mess up just like me. But watching these programmes has certainly improved my knowledge of food and ingredients, which is pretty important if you're going to write about food. My 13 years at the Coventry Telegraph as a feature writer included being the Food and Drink writer. This really used to make friends and family laugh, because there was a saying in my house that you knew when dinner was ready because the smoke alarm would go off. And at wor...

This month the body of James Martin was found floating off his private island in Bermuda . Although the press immediately rang in the hope of digging up some “suspicious circumstances”, it seems more likely that a man of eighty going for a vigorous swim in the sea died of natural causes. I knew him on and off for twenty years. Although many years would elapse between the times we would spend together, I am sad to think I won’t see him again. He was a true original. Last time I saw him was at a very splendid, private, “candle-lit”, dinner in one of the grandest Pall Mall Clubs, where he was talking about the future of the planet and of mankind. It was a talk I had heard him give many times, but it was none the less galvanising for that. In the opening lines of his best-selling thriller, "The Ghost", Robert Harris quotes me as saying: "Of all the advantages that ghosting offers, one of the greatest must be the opportunity that you get to meet people of interest...

          My recent book, “James Martin: The Change Agent”, is now available on Kindle as an e-book – a highly suitable format for a text which provides a dramatic view of what the future holds for all of us.           The story started when I received an urgent invitation to a mysterious private island in Bermuda from an old friend who had recently donated more than £100-million to Oxford University .           The island gradually revealed its labyrinthine secrets as the host, futurist James Martin, explained the choice that faces us all: to create the greatest Utopia ever, or plunge ourselves back into the Dark Ages, maybe even destroying Homo sapiens completely.           At the same time he explained how a shy boy from a poor family in Ashby-de-la-Zouche had come to be Oxford Univers...