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For someone so indivisible from the altogether serious business of virtuoso violin-playing - with its exacting levels of self-discipline and its station at the altar of high culture - Itzhak Perlman should, one might reflect, seem rather more daunting than he does. We are, after all, talking about a violinist of real genius: a man in whose hands the instrument has a kind of molten ferocity that distracts from but does not diminish his technical mastery. He is, without doubt, the repertoire's greatest living interpreter.

But alas, there is nothing daunting, nothing stern, about Perlman - no loftiness or hauteur, no hint of a tortured soul. He may revel in Beethoven and Mahler but he does not share their manic severity. On the contrary, millions around the world love him as much for the enveloping warmth of his personality as for the emotional range of his playing (though the two may be inseparable). Like the late Luciano Pavarotti, he has for decades performed an almost ambassadorial role for classical music, critical adulation combining with the force of his own irrepressible joy in music-making to catapult him into the global popular consciousness.

And so, when he tells me with boyish glee that the last thing to survive when the world ends is certain to be Mozart's violin sonatas, it is difficult to be persuaded from the notion that Perlman is the effervescent pedagogue we all wish we'd had in school. He is, whisper it, almost as much fun to listen to talking as he is to hear play.

The 66-year-old Israeli-born American, who will perform his first concerts in Macau and Hong Kong for nine years this week, has spoken at length before of how he often asks his students - or when he conducts, entire orchestras - to think about colours or types of food in order to get them to play a piece of music in a certain way. "What do you say to an orchestra that has played, let's say, Beethoven's 1st Symphony 200 times? The way I do it is to just try to think of what I would like to hear from a piece, how I hear it in my head." he tells me. "I would call it suggesting what you want the orchestra to sound like."

Having taken up the baton relatively late in his career, Perlman has, over the last decade or so, conducted many of the most prestigious orchestras in the US, Europe and beyond. He was, until recently, also Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Westchester Philharmonic in New York, where he lives with his wife, Toby. Together, they run the Perlman Music Program, a summer camp for exceptionally talented young string players, and since 1999 he has taught all year round at New York's Juillard School of Music - the institution at which he himself studied the violin, under the great Ivan Galamian and Dorothy DeLay, after relocating from Tel Aviv in the late 1950s.

"For me these things are all very much connected," he says. "Teaching and conducting have an effect on you as a performer. Instead of saying to someone they must play a certain way, I talk to myself. I learn to listen in a particular way, so that I can do what I am hearing in the music. Listening is the most important word - the difference between a good performance and an okay performance is in how well the performer listens to what he or she does when they play."

Perlman's own students are mostly between 14 and 16. "I can have a better effect on the way they play because they have not developed the habits that older students have picked up," he says. He is uncomfortable with the phrase "child prodigy", believing it to create unnecessary pressure on parents and children, but it's worth remembering he gave his own first recital aged 10 and was soon thereafter performing with the Israeli Broadcast Orchestra.

In reality, he says, he hated practicing and in his reflections on his own youth there is a surprising degree of mixed feeling. He loved the instrument and went through periods of "completely idolising" first Fritz Kreisler and later David Oistrakh. "But I wasn't sure I could do it [be like them]. You just keep hoping and practicing. If you have talent then people give you support, which I had, but you need an awful lot of negative vibes as well to do this."

Making things harder, quite probably, was the fact that, having contracted polio at the age of four, he was unable to walk without crutches - to this day he relies on them, and an electric scooter, for mobility, and plays the violin while seated. "People ask me what would I have done if I had not had polio as a young child," he says. "I really don't know. I would probably have done the same. When I wanted to play the violin I did not have polio. It was not something that came after."

In the event, two appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS in 1958 made him a household name in the US at the tender age of 13, and in 1964 he won the prestigious Leventritt Competition, paving the way for a career touring the world's concert halls.

Almost five decades later he is the most recorded violinist in history, possesses 15 Grammy Awards and has played with every major orchestra in the world - including the Israel Philharmonic, with whom he made history by going behind the Iron Curtain to perform in Warsaw and Budapest in 1987, and in the Soviet Union in 1990. He has received honorary degrees from Ivy League universities and had successive US presidents clamouring to weigh him down with medals. And in addition he has recorded jazz and klezmer albums, performed as a soloist on the soundtracks to three movies - Schindler's List, Zhang Yimou's Hero and Memoirs of a Geisha (along with the cellist Yo-Yo Ma) - and made countless television appearances in the US, including on The Tonight Show and Sesame Street.

A 1980 clip of him performing a Beethoven duet with a tuba-playing Telly Monster can, inevitably, be found on YouTube; not so the 2004 PBS special Perlman in Shanghai, but it chronicles something a little more historic - a visit of the Perlman Music Program to the mainland that culminated in a concert at the Shanghai Grand Theatre featuring one thousand young American and Chinese violinists.

"We linked up with kids from the Shanghai Conservatory," he says. "Chamber music, certainly a few years ago, did not have the importance there that we feel it should have, so it was one of the things we wanted to promote. But generally in Asia right now, there are a lot of very fine musicians coming through. The ratio of kids coming in from the Far East on our programme is rising - from Korea, China, Japan. It's really a lot. In the late 1950s, early 1960s, string players tended to come from Europe, Russia maybe, the United States and Israel. Right now the cycle has really shifted to Asia for young string players."

When I put it to him that he has form in terms of breaking down cultural barriers via music, the response comes back with almost evangelistic certainty: "Music is, simply put, an international language."

"No matter where I go to play or the culture of that country, when it comes to classical music everybody has a common reaction to it," he adds. "As an Israeli, there were occasions where I have gone to countries where Israel did not have diplomatic relations yet and you knew that relationships would improve because of those visits with the Israel Philharmonic. The music was a step to improving relations. Because everybody speaks that language.

"There is something about music that is so important to the development of humans. I am asked what I would do without music. I think society would be much worse; it's the soul of society. What would we do without it?" It doesn't bear thinking about, of course; but at least the Mozart sonatas are safe.

This article appeared in The South China Morning Post

All of a sudden the taxi driver has been overcome by a fit of the giggles. Is it the fare? We've barely moved in about 20 minutes and the meter has nudged its way up from ridiculously cheap to merely cheap. It is not the fare.

"London, Hong Kong, it's the same," he says finally, pointing over at the massed divisions of demonstrators snaking along Hennessey Road in the opposite direction to us. "People don't like government, make protest. It's same."

Okay. Yeah, I nod. Protest. Government. London. But wait - London? Nobody's smashing windows or setting about police vans. In fact, it's all rather peaceable. I mean, whoever heard of an angry mob carrying parasols? Maybe the anarchists are late. No trouble, I say. No violence. Unfortunately for our conversation, no understand. Well it was fun while it lasted.

But still, I'm right. This march - they've been held every year on July 1 since the British split for home in 1997 - appears to stir up all the animus of a Hare Krishna rally. The government has been trying to do away with by-elections and so this is the biggest turnout since 2004. But still, not even the chanting's aggressive. And what do they want? Well, universal suffrage would be a start. "One person, one vote" is the shibboleth. In May, incidentally, the Brits were asked whether in future they wanted two votes in general elections, or something to that effect, and declined. Instead they've been out marching against cuts in government spending that so far don't appear to be cuts at all, the erosion of middle class entitlements and suchlike.

I'd seen groups of protestors gathering earlier on. Hawkers sold t-shirts emblazoned with pro-democracy slogans and - the very latest in radical chic - Guy Fawkes masks; volunteers handed out pamphlets and placards and John Lennon's Working Class Hero blared from a loudspeaker. And it struck me that if the self-pitying jeremiads of a dead hippy were to be the democratic movement's rallying call, then the Chinese Communist Party needn't worry all that much.

It is often claimed, indeed, that there will be no great clamour for democracy on mainland China whilst the government is delivering nine per cent growth year on year. Growth, however, may not necessarily preclude anti-government sentiment if it is accompanied by a widening of the gap between the rich and the rest. And this, probably more than the desire for greater democracy, is what explains the 218,000 turnout in Hong Kong last week. As much as they have compounded the miseries of the poor, rising rents and living costs are squeezing the middle classes. The rentier class rules. The picture is not, in fact, so very different from that of London after all.

Later on, there were also a few arrests: 228 to be exact. But one shouldn't jump to conclusions. The offending parties were, for the most part, demonstrators who refused to go home. There is so little in the way of crime in Hong Kong that its bobbies occasionally feel the need of something to do.

When I was at Glasgow University, academics took every opportunity to shove it down biddable undergraduate throats that Edward Said was right about everything. One, I remember, offered up Alfred Hitchcock's 1931 film Rich and Strange as final proof that the sole purpose of western civilisation since about the time of the Crusades has been to peddle racialist and imperialist untruths about the Orient. This is the dogma outlined in Orientalism, Said's most famous book, the influence of which over the last 30 years outweighs its merit by far.

The title of that early "talkie" derives from Ariel's song in The Tempest: she makes it known to the shipwrecked Ferdinand that his father has perished and lies at the bottom of the sea, which misfortune has turned him "into something rich and strange," bean curd perhaps. Fred and Emily, Hitchcock's prim young English couple, off spending a wodge of inherited wealth on a cruise to Singapore, find everything they encounter east of, well, Dover, strange and exotic. Ultimately they are fleeced for their money and go back to London, where Fred gets his missus to put on a nice steak and kidney pie. Unfortunately it escaped my humourless tutor - a Canadian, I seem to think - that the joke was never other than on the Brits themselves. It is as Noel Coward had it in the song: "Why do the wrong people travel when the right people stay back home?"

I come to recount all of this as, in the last couple of weeks, I have moved to Hong Kong. As its gleaming towers serve to declare, it is certainly rich; and insofar as everything at street level looks to my racialist and imperialist eye like a restaurant, it also feels strange. But strange, too, is a feeling of widespread confidence in its institutions. China, Francis Fukuyama has said, has the best modern bureaucratic state in the world, but having failed to sanction a commercial middle class until recently, has a weak society. Hong Kong, notwithstanding its own democratic deficit, appears to have it all: a market economy, a strong society and efficient government. Regarding this last, Hong Kong's impressive Immigration Tower has an entire level devoted to welcoming "quality immigrants". Suffice to say I collected my papers on another floor.

Jacobs the pharmacist looked up with a scowl from his newspaper, the Atlanta Constitution, as the door made its customary pinging noise, the kind of pinging noise pharmacists' doors had been making since the days of Nostrodamus. He was annoyed, and the pinging was no salve to the headache he had induced by measuring out more than his usual dose of morphia the previous evening.

"Oh it's you, doctor," he said. "It is I", replied Pemberton, rocking slightly on the balls of his feet, a grin spread across his bearded face. It was too much for Jacobs. "I don't see what's to be smiling about," he said in that languid way favoured by morphia enthusiasts, and bade Pemberton cast his eye over an item in the Constitution which had just inflamed his headache. "This afternoon, of 7th May 1886, all individuals of moral conscience are called to march on the State House of Georgia", read Pemberton aloud.

"It's bad for business is what it is, doc," said Jacobs. "These temperance lunatics have their way and we men of science are done for. It'll be an end to Pemberton's coca wine before you can say 'and a half bottle for the missus, Mr Jacobs'."

Pemberton, however, had his Gladstone bag on the counter by now and had removed the stopper from a curious-looking decanter. "I think we have a solution, Jacobs," he said. "I have perfected a new concoction, one free of alcohol but every bit as moreish as coca wine. Even more moreish, you might say."

Jacobs peered at the new liquid, which was by now fizzing away like blazes. It was black and heady. "Looks like you could descale the lavatory with this stuff," he said. "I don't suppose..."

"The recipe's a secret," said Pemberton, pouring him a draught. "All I will reveal is that there's kola nuts, sugar and some other stuff in it. It'll bring you off the morphia, for sure, and it'll cure nervous prostration, distempers of the mind and irregularities of the kidneys. Oh, and impotence, too."

The pharmacist held his glass aloft and regarded it with a beady eye, his left one; then, gingerly, he knocked it back. He let out a great "aaah", and burped. "An extraordinary potion, Dr Pemberton," he exclaimed. "My word, most extraordinary. I must have it for sale tomorrow. But how do you call it?"

"Hmm," said Pemberton. "I hadn't thought of that. Something alliterative, I think. Coca-Cobra, maybe, or Coma-Cola, or Holy Molar. I'll get back to you on that."

The following is an extract from a circular email which was forwarded to me last week. Its author, one Tom Brown, was presumed to have died some time ago. Suffice to say he is well retired from public life and suffers from senility, but his observations on matters political may be of interest:

"Dear chums [...] Those of you who still have faculties, nay a pulse, in working order, may well have noticed things are not as they were in our time. Those Eton chaps seem to have the whole business sown up, for starters. I mean to say, I can't think of an Old Rugbeian in the Cabinet.

"You may well conceive of my surprise, then, on hearing the name 'Harry Flashman' come spitting out of the wireless on The World At One. By Jupiter, says I to myself, hasn't old Flashy had enough misadventure? But then I remembered Flashy didn't make it through the Great War - some say he died falling from the Mata Hari's bedroom window - and as I listened on I was somewhat relieved to grasp that the late Brigadier was not in fact Her Majesty's Prime Minister and had only been likened to him; or rather, vice versa.

"As I comprehend the facts, the leader of something called the Labour Party thinks it quite the barb to call the PM Flashman instead of Cameron, which is his proper name, although some people insist on calling him 'Dave'. Well, I was intrigued to find out more about this Dave fellow, and it seems that not only is he frightfully young, mutatis mutandum he's really nothing like our old tormentor at all. In fact, Flashy would have shrank from the comparison as though it were double Latin.

"Now, some of you may recall that Flashy and I had our differences, and in all honesty he made my schooldays deuced unpleasant. But as the saying goes a roasting maketh a full man, or something, and, well, Empire demanded men like Flashy. That men like Flashy lost the Empire is beside the point - old Harry never picked a fight with a tyrant unless he dashed well had to and he certainly didn't gad about the world telling people we were responsible for its problems, not unless he was about to be killed."

The email goes on to compare Cameron's ability as a "swordsman" unfavourably with Flashman's, but we're keeping that bit to ourselves for legal reasons.

This article appeared in The Herald

Those rather tiresome people who spend their lives extolling the virtues of the internet will tell you that one of its advantages over older media is its interactivity. It's all very well saying this, of course, but in reality there are few devices more interactive than the telephone. And, though it may be a depressing truth it is one nevertheless that interacting with the television, by shouting it, is among the greatest joys modern life affords.

I myself cannot recall when I started shouting at the television. I do remember, however, taking particular exception to the children's presenter Andi Peters, whose inane chatter and lisp and daft spelling of his first name made him the most annoying man conceivable. Now, I note, most people on television are like Peters: shouty, noisome and in a permanent state of excitement.

Earlier this month a pensioner named Martin Soloman was sent down for 14 months by Gloucestershire crown court for persistently violating his neighbours' peace with noisy, foul-mouthed rants at programmes that irritated him. One has sympathy with the neighbours, of course, but we should not be too quick to pass judgment on Mr Soloman, who is, after all, an old sailor, fer chrissakes.

First of all, the programme makers must shoulder some of the blame for making such knowingly irritating programmes and manufacturing sadistic contests out of everything from selling pegs to cookery. And secondly it should be noted that the old chap reserved his worst rages for Question Time - which is understandable alone for the way its studio audiences can always be relied on to applaud the most fatuous of points.

Mr Soloman's case is an extreme one, but shouting at the box is on the whole a rewarding exercise. Like a magnet it draws out the urge to despair at one's fellow man, leaving only slight feelings of guilt and the resolve to try to be nicer to him.

This article appeared in The Herald

Seemingly there is a young woman in Massachusetts whose nickname - her real name is Ashley - is The Ashes. Nowt to do with the cricket - as I say, she is from Massachusetts - but that hasn't stopped thousands of fans of the sport from subscribing to @theashes on Twitter. After overcoming initial bamboozlement, she has tried, womanfully (if that is a word), to service their need for commentary, but in a moment of frustration last week demanded to know: "What is a Test?"

One can well imagine the question being asked in Scotland, and we're in the backyard of the home of cricket. It would seem logical, moreover, to wonder why there is Test after Test, but never the Real Thing. But making sense of it all is very time-consuming, which is presumably why Tests last several days.

Now, I'm not suggesting it would be a good idea for Scotsmen and women, en masse, to start wielding bat and ball - for a start the balls are hard, painful things, and in any case you won't get playing many overs in this weather. But I do believe that if there is a more powerful restorative than sleep on dreary winter nights it is the bonhomie of Test Match Special on Radio 4 Longwave.

Tune in from midnight to be transported to the land of summer skies (Australia) in the company of the genial Aggers (Jonathan Agnew). Unfortunately there is no Blowers (Henry Blofeld) this series, but of course, there is always Geoffrey Boycott (Boycs) to be enjoyed. Soon you will be spouting blithesomely about square leg and off-stump and silly mid on (which is when the fielders dress as clowns to distract batsmen), and debating different bowling deliveries: jaffer, worm burner, googly, Chinaman. Even the resentment of the Aussies when they are losing cannot dampen spirits.

This article appeared in The Herald

It's earlyish in the day, but Alan Cumming seems to be in one of his more sombre moods. The Scottish actor, now a joint American and British citizen, is refusing to entertain tittle tattle, certainly. Even his own. "That's just trashy gossip stuff", he groans when I bring up his purported desire to see Barack Obama naked.

Regarding the man whose election campaign he endorsed (he was vetted by Team Obama and would have been an "official" supporter but for his citizenship not being approved in time), Cumming said last year: "Great leaders, charismatic leaders [...] usually have big penises." But this morning he's less declamatory about the US president. "I'm still really, really amazed that he's president and also really glad," he says, "but I wish he would act on some of his policies sooner."

The source of his anguish is gay rights, and in particular the admission of openly gay men and women to the US military, a policy he believes the Obama administration has dragged its heels over: "They've made gay people feel like the train is coming, but they've not delivered."

This article appeared in the magazine Metropolitan

THE common wisdom about bears is that they are best left alone, unless they are Gentle Ben or of the stuffed variety. That policy was disregarded, to propitious effect, however, in the case of a Syrian brown bear befriended by Polish soldiers in 1942, and about whose remarkable life there is currently an exhibition running at London's Sikorski Polish Institute.

Wojtek - the handle he was given by the Polish Second Corps, an army formed by Poles newly released from Soviet internment camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan after Hitler declared war on Stalin - was an orphaned cub when he was acquired from a boy in Hamadan, Iran, in exchange for a few tins of meat.

His only comrades being human, he grew to be the most human of bears: he was adopted by Artillery Supply Command as the Poles joined British forces fighting Rommel in the desert, lived with the other men in their tents and was taught to salute when greeted. By 1944 he had an official rank and number, and in Italy, at Monte Cassino, he carried live shells and artillery from truck to gun emplacement unfazed by the explosions going on around his fuzzy ears. He was even given rations - honey, cigarettes and beer. Of the latter, he drank two bottles daily, while his party trick involved swallowing lit cigarettes and exhaling the smoke.

The Sikorski exhibition has been curated by Krystyna Ivell. Her father, an officer, was shot by the Soviets at Katyn in 1939. Her mother would spend the latter part of the war working for the Polish government-in-exile's Secret Bureau, alongside Menachem Begin, but when she and her daughter were released from a Siberian camp in 1941, they crossed the Caspian Sea and found themselves well within the compass of the Wojtek legend.

"I never met him but I followed him as a child," says Ivell, who has told Wojtek's story with archive film footage, stills and cuttings. "The exhibition is for my own satisfaction. For Poles under Communism, they weren't allowed to know this history, so it's an accessible route through Wojtek to a bit of history - the film we have made has children glued to it."

She adds: "Wojtek is not a cuddly toy or a cartoon character. He was essential to the soldiers; he kept their sanity in a way. They gave him their love and attention and he returned it in spades."

By the end of the war, Wojtek and his company were living on a farm in Berwickshire. When the soldiers were demobbed in 1947, he was taken in by Edinburgh Zoo, where he died in 1963. When his old mates visited they would frequently climb over the fence and hug him, much to the consternation of the zookeepers. Now, Edinburgh City Council plan to erect a statue of him. Whether he'll be smoking remains to be seen.

This article appeared in The Times