Biography:
About: British author and journalist, known for his award-winning interviews in the Sunday Telegraph. See nigelfarndale.com bio.
Education: University of Durham: Philosophy MA
Career: Worked as a farmer in Yorkshire before being asked by Auberon Waugh (see The season's grievings) to write for Literary Review. Has since contributed to The Daily Telegraph, The Times, Harpers & Queen, The Spectator, Country Life and has writtten a regular column as The Sunday Telegraph as well as reviews and interviews
Current position/role: Interviewer, feature writer and columnist
Other roles/Main role:
Other activities:
Disclosures:
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Broadcast media:
Video:
Controversy/Criticism:
Awards/Honours: 'Haw-Haw' was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; British Press Awards: Interviewer of the Year, 2000
Scoops:
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Articles:
- Those brief encounters between Rebekah Brooks and Jack Straw... - Why should the Leveson Inquiry be denied the two high-profile commuters' gossip 'about personalities' - 20th May 2012
- The Mayor of London is a true eccentric - just like Winston Churchill - Voters are drawn to people who don’t care about their appearance - 13th May 2012
- I see myself as the Hugh Grant character in Four Weddings and a Funeral - There is a greatness to my lateness. I would go further and say my lateness counts as a superpower - 22nd April 2012
- Acting is anything but easy - People think that they can act when they seldom can - 15th April 2012
- Texas has proper storms - not just hosepipe bans - Our weather is like that piano concerto played by Eric Morecambe: all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order - 8th April 2012
- You have been a mother to the nation, ma'am - We can tease the Queen in the way we might tease our parents, and she will always rise above it - 1st April 2012
- A good, old-fashioned coup d’état from Mali - Coups used to happen on an almost weekly basis, but now hardly at all - 25th March 2012
- When was the last time Mr Cameron walked into a shop and bought something? - Cameron, Clegg and Osborne are what used to be called 'men of independent means' - 18th March 2012
- I just love being middle aged - As we age we become more accepting of the world as it is - 11th March 2012
- The British Citizenship Test is bizarre - Most of the questions we ask of immigrants seem to be about the welfare system - 4th March 2012
- James Corden, the Oscars have need of you - If only Oscar-acceptance speeches could be forcibly cut short like Adele's Brit-waffle, says Nigel Farndale (and his agent, and his wonderful team, and his parents, and God, and God's agent...) - 26th February 2012
- Abu Qatada is not an extremist, he's a 'radical' - like Genghis Khan, or Hitler - The BBC thinks we mustn't show prejudice against people just because they incite mass murder - 12th February 2012
- It's the Dickens of a name to deal with - Being descended from Dickens can mean more hard times than great expectations - 5th February 2012
- If Birdsong's too quiet, just reach for the remote - Viewers who complain about mumbling actors are missing the point entirely - 29th January 2012
- The British really like to luxuriate in frugality - Unfortunately for the UK economy, being flash with cash is not part of the national character - 22nd January 2012
- My dry January coincides with a sudden surge in dinner parties - Why are there suddenly so many more opportunities not to drink at the beginning of the year - 15th January 2012
- Women don't know how we men suffer - Colds affect men worse than women - and that's a scientific fact - 8th January 2012
- How can Geoffrey Howe get out of Liverpoolgate? - Lord Howe could try the Lennon, the Clarkson or even the Emin Defence - 1st January 2012
- Do women actually like shopping, or are they just pretending? - Nigel Farndale refuses to believe that anyone can actually enjoy clothes shopping - 18th December 2011
- Cryonics: do you really want to wake up next to a 1,000-year-old Britney Spears? - Larry King and Britney Spears are converts to the religion of the deep freeze - 11th December 2011
- Oxbridge interview technique: I would never have done that well when I was 17 - The average celebrity’s intelligence is no match for that of the average Oxbridge candidate - 4th December 2011
- What drives Katherine Jenkins to busk in a wig? - And why are Sting, Neil Young and Rick Wakeman on the street-corner too - 27th November 2011
- I'm just like Sarkozy and Obama - gremlins are after me too - The misdirected email is the cringeworthy equivalent of the open mic for us lesser mortals - 13th November 2011
- The Chinese president displays an Elizabeth Taylor-like gift for lateness - President Sarkozy was given a masterclass in the art of pointedly making people wait - 6th November 2011
- All bald men look alike, but some look more alike than others - Being mistaken for someone else is always embarrassing - just ask Iain Duncan Smith and Francis Wheen - 30th October 2011
- When President Bush got through to Major Major - John Major's story about a special moment in the special relationship has put a smile on my face all week - 23rd October 2011
- As a public speaker, I'm more Katie Price than Boris Johnson - Um, er... oh for the Mayor of London's gift for extempore oratory - 16th October 2011
- I pity the Kindle generation - they will never know the sweet nostalgia of scanning their bookshelves - According to a new survey, two thirds of the books we have on our shelves are purely for show - 9th October 2011
- Julian Assange writes the first unauthorised autobiography - 'All memoir is prostitution' says the WikiLeaks founder with the £1.2 million advance - 25th September 2011
- The changing world of the secretary - Secretaries are not what they used to be - 18th September 2011
- Cameras in court will make our justice system as bad as our politics - Letting TV cameras into courtrooms will reduce public respect - just look at what happened to Parliament... - 11th September 2011
- How did Britain become addicted to self-storage? - Giant, gaudy warehouses sprout up across the land - and often we can't even remember what we're paying to keep in them - 4th September 2011
- Heard the one about the bloke who couldn't tell jokes...? - Even Bob Monkhouse couldn't teach me the knack of delivering a punchline - 28th August 2011
- Is Nick Clegg the political equivalent of 'Higgy the Human Sponge'? - Nick Clegg's taste for swimming in icy water shows the character of the man - 21st August 2011
- UK riots: Should I cut short my holiday? - Whimsical columnists are unlikely to get called back to London to cover the riots - 14th August 2011
- There should be a taboo against discussing schools at dinner parties - Talking about sex is fine - just don't mention education - 31st July 2011
- We'll never reach a 3,000th Test match at this rate - Test matches are proving too slow for an impatient world, but with speeded-up snooker and chess, where is all this extra free time? - 24th July 2011
- With a Kindle, no one can see the Mills & Boon cover - The e-book has come to the rescue of the bluestocking with a guilty yearning for Mills & Boon - 10th July 2011
- What do Christine Lagarde and Herman Van Rompuy have in common? - I'll give you a hint, it's something they share with David Cameron and Adolf Hitler as well - 3rd July 2011
- Who'd want to bring their mum to a job interview? - Nigel Farndale on the inexorable rise of the pushy parent - 26th June 2011
- The research that proves Enoch Powell right - Enoch Powell's preference for speaking on a full bladder now has science to back it up - 12th June 2011
- I’m a great believer in giving things a good stare - That's the way I spotted Barack and the Beast - 29th May 2011
- How Dennis Hopper and Ian McEwan Googled each other under the table - Covertly Googling your conversational partner is an increasingly common phenomenon and not just among celebrities - 22nd May 2011
- So was Elvis Presley the Seve Ballesteros of rock'n'roll? - The problem with comparisons is that they have to work both ways - 15th May 2011
- Luckily, it's still all right to mock the French - Apart from Brigitte Bardot, and some nice wine, what have the French ever done for us - 8th May 2011
- A Hitler moustache looks funny on just about anyone - apart from a German - When you interview a famous German - like Michael Schumacher, say - try not to let him see that you've added a Hitler moustache to his photograph - 1st May 2011
- How to insult a town: expert advice from Andrew Flintoff, Boris Johnson and David Cameron - So how did Andrew Flintoff manage to hit the sensitivites of Burnley for six - 17th April 2011
- When did marriage get political? - Ed Miliband's choice of a civil ceremony shows the agonies that marriage puts Lefties through - 3rd April 2011
- I'll keep telling you my Brian Moore story until it's true - I had a moment with Brian Moore once in John Lewis's – honest - 27th March 2011
- I remember my mother dragged me once, kicking and screaming, to a 'viewing of the wedding presents’ - Oh great. William and Kate have announced that they would like well-wishers to make donations to their chosen charities, instead of buying them wedding gifts - 20th March 2011
- Prince Andrew had Goga Ashkenazi's support - but it could have been worse... - The Duke of York is not the only celebrity to have an unusual character ride to his rescue - 13th March 2011
- Brian Cox proves that 42 really is the answer to everything - The greatness of the Foo Fighters and the runaway success of astronomy with a Northern accent - it's all part of a bigger picture - 6th March 2011
- Was it having kids that made Sarah Brown's autobiography so boring? - Nigel Farndale gets to grips with Sarah Brown's memoir, Behind The Black Door - 27th February 2011
- Michael Barrymore and the eternal mystery of a woman's handbag - Only one man has ever known the full contents of a woman's handbag - and he lived to regret it - 20th February 2011
- The 'confession app' tells us exactly where we're going wrong - In a whirl of tweets and texts, we're losing all sense of how to strike the right tone - 13th February 2011
- My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding: what if ignorance really is bliss? - The astonishing behaviour on the mesmerising Channel 4 show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding has prompted an existential crisis for Nigel Farndale - 6th February 2011
- Sexual power corrupts - If our society was matriarchal, would it be better - 30th January 2011
- Our addiction to coffee has gone too far - If Blair had been drinking Ovaltine instead of coffee all the time, perhaps we wouldn’t have gone to war so often - 23rd January 2011
- Mark Kennedy got one of the better undercover assignments - A undercover mission that involves sleeping with as many nubile green women as possible? Sign me up - 16th January 2011
- Ashes 2010: Following the England team made me feel like Mission Control - Nigel Farndale on how he and his son monitored events on the other side of the world - 9th January 2011
- I think I have a Coalition-shaped brain - I feel my amygdala is Tory, but the anterior cingulate has definite Liberal tendencies - 1st January 2011
- The Beatles might still be bigger than Jesus - The fervour surrounding the Fab Four has reached near-religious proportions - 26th December 2010
- Politicians should look less like Mr Darcy and more like Vince Cable - We prefer our leaders to be slightly odd-looking - 19th December 2010
- A Russian honeytrap will need all the subtlety of Ivana Humpalot - It doesn't take finesse to ensnare the male libido - 12th December
- Brian Blessed's blow-up was distinctly British - One of our best traits is our ability to laugh at ourselves – and at foreigners with funny moustaches - 5th December 2010
- Red Ed' just has to grin and bear it - We can't choose our nicknames, says Nigel Farndale (aka 'Nidge', aka 'Cabbage Parrot') - the only solution is to suffer in silence - 28th November 2010
- Forget the sunbeds - it's posh to be pale - Nigella Lawson provides conclusive proof of my General Theory of Tanning - 14th November 2010
- When the clocks go back, it's time to do my horological duty - why is it still the man's job to put the clocks back - 31st October 2010
- Back to prison: that's my story - Nigel Farndale explains how a career opportunity took him straight to Wormwood Scrubs - 24th October 2010
- Rockers should age in public - If you are going to age as a rock god, at least do it in the spotlight and let us get used to it. That’s where Axl Rose went wrong - 17th October 2010
- How I cracked the secret of Donald Trump's hair - Discovering the method behind the madness of Donald Trump's hairdo may be my lasting contribution to the store of human knowledge - 10th October 2010
- I have to work on my prize-losing face - It's hard to lose in public, as Australia's Next Top Model has just revealed - 3rd October 2010
- The longer you are a Radio 1 DJ, the more likely you are to get the sack - Chris Moyles might do well to ponder the fate of Dave Lee Travis, who had twice as many listeners - 26th September 2010
- Why I love the Duke of Edinburgh - Despite the jokes, the Royal family understand the value of formality - 19th September 2010
- Please don't try reading my mind - They’re inventing a machine that will put thoughts into words – imagine the humiliation - 11th September 2010
- We're not a thick nation, just ignorant - GMTV's cretinous Questions of the Week make you think: maybe stupidity is relative - 29th August 2010
- Flying long-haul is a torture that belongs in one of the circles of hell - Flight attendant Steve Slater deservedly became a hero after fleeing his plane down the emergency chute - 15th August 2010
- Tory stereotypes: why David Cameron docked his tails - The Prime Minister's decision not to wear a morning suit at his sister's wedding stemmed from an unfortunate incident involving plus-fours and a photographer - 8th August 2010
- In praise of silence - Don't bring your vuvuzelas round to mine - 1st August 2010
- Sadness: it's only natural on holiday - The English love to feel sorry for themselves. And where better to do that than on holiday? - 25th July 2010
- If the new Tom Jones album is that bad, I must hear it - The Tom Jones album that an Island Records exec calls 'a sick joke' sounds like the one for me - 11th July 2010
- Lottie the tortoise had the right idea: we all need to take it easy - There's a lot to be said for life in the slow lane - 3rd July 2010
- Real men don't cry. We just get something in our eye - Nigel Farndale explains the useful skill of man-crying - 13th June 2010
- When a man has to have a 42in HD television - Nigel Farndale explains why he bought a new TV as the World Cup looms - 6th June 2010
- Tony Blair's new salary is difficult to picture - A billion pounds I struggle with, although I can still picture it, just about. But a trillion? It's hopeless - 30th May 2010
- It's all right, Russell: not all Yorkshiremen can sound like Parky - Russell Crowe went to great lengths to get his Yorkshire accent right. He even listened to recordings of Sir Michael Parkinson - 16th May 2010
- Would Florence become FloNi? - If Florence Nightingale had been around today, Max Clifford would have negotiated a million-pound deal for her - 9th May 2010
- It takes persistence to reach the bottom of the heap - Through long effort, I have held my position as the worst golfer I know - 2nd May 2010
- Volcanoes and Vegas are an uneasy combination - Nigel Farndale shares a tale of glitz, desperation and family pride - 25th April 2010
- Even the dead can't escape the nanny state - The state's restrictions on our behaviour are getting beyond a joke - 11th April 2010
- Unlike the poor, Graham is seldom with us' - Norman Wisdom's school report read: 'The boy is every inch a fool, but luckily for him he's not very tall,' - 4th April 2010
- Do the party leaders have a Willie? - A comedy sidekick is a vital attribute for any political leader - 28th March 2010
- Explaining a Darwin Award death - How does one relate the news of a particularly embarrassing demise - 21st March 2010
- David Cameron's embarrassing moments are all his own - You haven’t arrived in politics until you have a catchphrase attributed to you that you didn’t actually say - 14th March 2010
- A tough crowd at Book Week - During Book Week, my children’s school found a proper author to come in and talk to them. My godson’s had to make do with me - 7th March 2010
- The black sheep in George Osborne's family - If the Osborne brothers happen to be under the same roof today – for a traditional Sunday lunch at the parental home, say – the silences will doubtless be scaly - 28th February 2010
- Reaching for my revolver - From karoake to Britain's Got Talent, modern life is filled with so many things that are designed to annoy - 13th February 2010
- Katie, can I help you with the title of your next autobiography? - Ms Price is on her fourth autobiography in six years. You have to admire the woman’s stamina - 7th February 2010
- If I were David Cameron, I know what I'd do first... - When you become prime minister, you can have round anyone you like - 31st January 2010
- Our future leaders are posting their drunken pictures online - A whole generation of politicians is busy filling Facebook with images of themselves drunk at parties - 24th January 2010
- There's no honour in Roger Day's medal charade - There's a place for lovable rogues, but pretending to be a war hero is a deception too far - 17th January 2010
- The banana: why is it such an object of ridicule? - It's the fruit that's low-calorie, luxurious, lovely to look at - and, it seems, endlessly hilarious - 10th January 2010
- Kids need to be bored, so I'm smashing the Wii - Over-stimulation is the enemy of imagination – we should give our children the gift of boredom - 27th December 2009
- Tis the season of tragedy and drama - Keep watching the news - this is the time when the big stories start to happen - 20th December 2009
- Geraint Woolford, meet Geraint Woolford... - From D-Day codewords to the only two men with a particular name meeting in hospital, life is full of staggering coincidences - 13th December 2009
- Are atheists really fundamentalists? - A debate between Richard Dawkins and Charles Moore intrigues Nigel Farndale - 6th December 2009
- Why can't a woman be more like a woman? - Nigel Farndale often finds himself trapped in a train carriage with teenage girls and, quite frankly, he's terrified - 29th November 2009
- Yes Minister is a sign of a healthy democracy - You can tell that Ukraine has become a real democracy – they’re laughing at 'Yes Minister’ - 22nd November 2009
- Ignore Jonny Wilkinson - pigs rule the roost - Goats are such dull and charmless creatures. Pigs are superior in so many ways - 15th November 2009
- What is the age we are for eternity? - Mao, Victoria, Elvis. At some point in their history their image gets frozen for ever - 8th November
- The noble history of the conscientious objector - The question about what your father "did in the war" has resonance down the generations - 25th October 2009
- The Queen's night at the theatre - I'd love to quiz the poor startled woman in the seat next to the Queen about what she thought of the play - 18th October 2009
- Simon Cowell's X Factor crybabies are no role models for my sons - When Gazza cried in public 20 years ago, it was remarkable, but there's no stiff upper lip in the X Factor era - 11th October 2009
- How to grow old gracefully - and interestingly - As a child I worked out that I'd reach three score years and ten in 2034. Now I'm older that date doesn't seem so far away - 4th October 2009
- GB: a nation of cheats and liars - A collapse in moral standards has turned us into a nation of cheats and liars - 27th September 2009
- The Seventies was indeed a golden age - In the 1980s there was Frankie Goes To Hollywood and that was it. One band. One song. An entire decade - 27th September 2009
- The burning question of Diana's letters - Princess Margaret may have done historians a favour by burning much of Princess Diana's correspondence - 20th September 2009
- Will anyone notice a postal strike? - Since nothing of any importance arrives by snail-mail, striking postal workers will hardly bring the nation to its knees - 13th September 2009
- Why live your life through a view-finder? - Photography, once a noble art, has become, thanks to the move to digital, a mental illness - 23rd August 2009
- Why Tony Benn needs his hair shirt - If I lived in Holland Park, like Tony Benn, I too might consider it a moral duty to use the state education system - 16th August 2009
- The Ashes: the big love-in between England and Australia - We enjoy the Ashes so much because we don't mind losing to the Australians, and they don't mind losing to us - 9th August 2009
- Swine Flu Nigel and the deadly handshake - Do I detect a little – I don't know what you might call it – flu envy? Flu-upmanship? - 26th July 2009
- Marriage proposals veer from the romantic to the nauseating - Men only make romantic gestures because they think women want them to . No wonder they sometimes get it wrong - 19th July 2009
- Learning to fail is part of growing up - It is not the done thing to be seen to try hard, to want victory too much - 5th July 2009
- Endearingly, it has emerged that Michael Jackson never swore - There are certain people who shouldn’t swear - 28th June 2009
- The return of 'Look and Learn' - For 20 years, 'Look and Learn' dazzled its young readers with knowledge. Now it's back, in book form - 21st June 2009
- Who, apart from the Prince of Wales, ever speaks up for beauty? - A newspaper last week compared the Prince of Wales to Charles Bronson in Death Wish, a self-appointed vigilante wreaking revenge on any proposal to build a column of glass and steel - 21st June 2009
- Phil Spector and the plight of the bald man - Perhaps Phil Spector was using his flamboyant wigs to make a point about the prejudice bald men face in society - 14th June 2009
- The iPod generation has skipped over music history - When the ability to select from millions of files came in, out went context - 7th June 2009
- Sex, sex, sex: We've had single-track minds for 35,000 years - The first figurine to be carved by a caveman looks a bit like Jordan, which tells us something about the human psyche - 17th May 2009
- The internet may make cynics of us yet - The mountainous, steaming quantity of horsedung out there on the internet makes you naturally more suspicious of conspiracy theories, not less - 10th May 2009
- How Omaha's crosses will speak to Barack Obama - visiting the American military cemetary in Normandy and imagines the impact it will have on America's new president - 26th April 2009
- How to beat those anti-social teenagers - We should take a tip from the Spartans, and bring back pointing and jeering - then our trains might be more civilised - 12th April 2009
- Michelle Obama, take note: we don't do hugs - When a true Englishman is hugged, every fibre of his being resists - 5th April 2009
- It's all the rage for mobsters to see a shrink - Mafia members and their relatives are taking to the psychologist's couch - 22nd March 2009
- It's a giant leap from the City to the classroom - I fear for the city slickers lured into inner city schools with just six months to train as teachers - 15th March 2009
- Spontaneity is the enemy of the witty retort - A football stadium is not quite Oscar Wilde's drawing room in Tite Street, but it was, nevertheless, the scene of a pithy exchange on Wednesday night - 8th March 2009
- Now we're all linked we must keep to ourselves - The Holy Grail of the online age is an email address that not even you mother knows - 1st March 2009
- The next step after the e-book is the ex-book - E-books will kill books, just as the iPod has killed music - 22nd February 2009
- How underpants could lift us out of the downturn - The revelation that Jeremy Paxman has been sent "parcel after parcel of pants" should lift national morale - 15th February 2009
- Stopped smoking? It doesn't have to be for ever - A national smoking day would be glorious and liberating - 8th February 2009
- My fiscal fecklessness is back in fashion - The housing bubble never really suited the self-depreciating British temperament - 1st February 2009
- Withnail and I: The finest ruin available to humanity - A remote and derelict cottage in Cumbria is coming on the market for the first time in decades… - 25th January 2009
- What advice would you give your unborn child? - A hilarious compendium of fatherly advice has become a surprising internet hit - 18th January 2009
- Wii folk are playing a dangerous game - Young Nintendo addicts will have nothing but a virtual childhood to look back on - 18th January 2009
- John Lennon was cool... but the Queen is cooler - The Queen's inscrutability gives her a magic that even a Beatle can't top - 11th January 2009
- This could be a cold snap to remember - Nigel Farndale tries to persuade his children that shivering is good exercise as he recalls a time of using a tractor to cut through the snow drifts - 4th January 2009
- New Year's resolution: I will understand football - A successful New Year's resolution, I find, is one unambitious in scope. It should also be vague, pathetically so, with no obvious time-frames and few targets - 28th December 2008
- Why men struggle when asked about love - The shape of a name is forming on my tongue and pushing against my teeth. Celia Johnson. Why am I thinking of her again? - 21st December 2008
- Robbie Williams and Take That, take note: Bands that break up should never make up - There was a purity to Morrissey and Marr's mutual loathing - 14th December 2008
- The first word document is the best - Should we worry about virtual learning? - 7th December 2008
- Christmas decorations in November? - There is no excuse for tinsel at home until the first Sunday of Advent at the earliest, which is today - 30th November 2008
- The art of phone conversation - After analysing the likes and dislikes of more than 2,000 phone users, Post Office researchers have devised the perfect phone conversation - 23rd November 2008
- I wish Radio 4 would drop its haitches - If there is a gory scene you don't want to watch on television you can hold up a cushion, but what is the radio listener's equivalent? - 16th November 2008
- Fat cats are officially in the doghouse - "Prime Minister, you know how you asked us to come up with political stunts that would distract the public from the financial crisis?" - 9th November 2008
- Let's face it, Britons are far better at frugality than conspicuous consumption - This may seem like one layer of gratitude too many, but I am grateful to Charles Moore for expressing his gratefulness to the Bishop of London, which is what he did in a recent Spectator diary - 2nd November 2008
- Sarah Palin must be a dirty creationist - Terribly sorry about survival of the fittest and all that - 21st September 2008
- A big hand for the sound of silence - a fuzzy dot on a screen was applauded in Switzerland when the Large Hadron Collider was finally switched on. If God had put in an appearance, no doubt there would have been a smattering of applause for Him too. What is going on? - 14th September 2008
- Call that a hoax? You could have fooled me - It's strange how often an obituary can lift your mood. Take that of Ken Campbell, the actor, director and practical joker who died a few days ago - 7th September 2008
- I couldn't put it down. Can I pick you up? - what to say on Penguin's new dating site - 31st August 2008
- A fine chance to fly the flag with pride - our airports should use the Union flag while they still can - 24th August 2008
- Bored of Beijing - Why is it, do you suppose, you never hear of sports fans measuring their lives in Olympic Games in the way they do World Cups? - 10th August 2008
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