Sign-up to receive Only Connect every four weeks and get notified when new articles are posted.

In 1485, Johannes Trithemius*, abbot of Sponheim in what is now western Germany, wrote a passionate treatise explaining why the newly invented printing press was a dangerous mistake. For Trithemius, the act of writing brought monks closer to God, and the printing press was a dangerous error. Besides the proximity to God, Trithemius was concerned about the source of his Benedictine monastery's income.

During a recent email exchange, Only Connect’s editor, Richard Pooley, and I discussed the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the United States and whether President Trump could do with some basic facts on negotiating with the Iranians. Both Trump and the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, have written books on negotiating. However, Trump’s ghost-writer, Tony Schwartz, and the publisher of The Art of the Deal, Howard Kaminsky, claim Trump didn’t write a word of it.

The British generation now drawing its old age pensions differs markedly in at least one respect from Generation X or Z or Q, or whatever now supports the Green Party. Us oldies spent most of our young lives smelling of slightly stale tobacco, with ash trays (occasionally even emptied) in every room of the house, and at every opportunity, flicking lighters for a quick draw. And there were plenty of opportunities: in the lecture hall, on buses and trains, in aircraft (later,

For those old enough to remember, the song Melting Pot was the debut single released in 1969 by UK pop group, Blue Mink. Although it has since been banned from the airways for “offensive racist language”, it was in fact a hymn to racial tolerance and multiculturism. This ‘hippy’ call for blending and racial integration was banned in 2019 as “likely to cause offence” after just ONE complaint to Ofcom when the song was played on ‘golden oldies’ station Gold. Frankly I never lik

The young couple were walking slowly up the steeply-inclined road from the centre of town. He was frowning at his smartphone. She was pointing at it. I had just come up from the canal towpath onto the road, heading for my nearest park. We were in Bath, UK, a city through which the river Avon winds on its way to Bristol. I asked the couple if they were lost...

I have been hired by a coffee farmer on the edge of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) in Tanzania to give advice on the endless battle between commercial farming and nature conservation. The NCA comprises the famous caldera itself plus the indigenous forest surrounding it. Sadly, I have long lost interest in the crater. In October 2001, just after 9/11, I took a client there on safari and we had the place to ourselves. Today over a million people a year visit the crater:

My first venture abroad was an exchange with young Eric de Lavigne. His mother was the worst cook in the whole of France, and he was the naughtiest nastiest boy I’ve ever met. A lot happened to me between then and the following entry from my journal. Not only did I grow from a somewhat precocious 12-year-old into an 18-year-old young man; I travelled alone or in company to Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Italy. I had my first serious love affair, initiated on the afternoon

And so the order went out from the editorial suite on the 51st level: “No more Trump”. And forty floors below, Stoker pulled up his green eyeshade, moodily pulled his half-written essay on Donald out of the battered Remington, and flung it at the waste paper basket, missing, as always, by a yard. Lolling back in the battered wooden chair which is standard issue to Only Connect scribblers, he surveyed the narrow view, blocked as it was by the soaring tower of Copper House, gl

The family call it “The Birth Certificate”. It is a single page torn out of a red notebook, one of many kept by their ancestor, a doctor in Southsea, England. In them he used to scribble notes about events – April/Engaged…Aug/Married (these in 1885) or any matter which puzzled, amused or inspired him – Geo IV spent his wedding night drunk across the grate. Why? Because he was also trying to earn some money by writing. A doctor in Victorian times had to canvass for patients an

A US President accused of sexual misconduct with an underage girl. In order to distract attention, the President orders a massive aerial bombing attack on a distant foreign country without prior consent from his allies. Of course this preposterous fiction could never happen in real life, but it was exactly this scenario which played out in the film Wag the Dog...