The Times, September 20 2016 As Trump and Clinton prepare to debate on TV, Nigel Farndale, who has met both, has some tips. As scoops go, it is not quite up there with Watergate, but I was the first journalist to uncover the secret of Donald Trump’s brushed-forward, combed-over hairstyle, the one that looks like a sunken apricot soufflé. He wets it, then applies copious amounts of hairspray. That was in 2008. When it became clear last year that he really was running for president — that it wasn’t a weird joke — my interview with him did much pinging back and forth on social media, especially in America. “People always comment on my hair,” he told me, “but it’s not that bad, and it ...

In 1982, London's leading literary lights gathered for a secret dinner party. The guest of honour? Margaret Thatcher. Nigel Farndale interviews the survivors The Observer, Saturday 7 December 2013 On a clear autumn night in 1982, a government Daimler pulled out of Downing Street and began its glide across London to a house in Ladbroke Grove. In the passenger seat was a personal protection officer. He had been to the house earlier that day to check the security arrangements for the evening and had decided there was no need to include sniffer dogs or metal detectors for the guests. (The Brighton bombing and the enhanced security that would come with it were two years away.) In the back was Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister.When they ...

Until I watch the prisoners line up alongside the chains laid out on the ground, I have half imagined that the term 'chain gang’ is being used in a loose and euphemistic way. But no. They are wearing heavy-duty work boots and, as the chains are padlocked around their ankles, they raise their left legs up behind them, bending at the knees like well-trained horses obliging a farrier. What makes this scene even more disturbing is the sex of the prisoners. They are all women. This is Arizona, America’s most draconian state. It is also its hottest, averaging around 40°C in the summer, which makes the concept of hard labour outdoors seem all the more cruel. Although it is 5am and dark, already the heat ...

When you contact the British National Party you cross over to the political dark side, a shadowy world over which neither Gordon Brown nor David Cameron hold dominion. There is paranoia behind the voice telling me that I, as a member of the press, will be allowed to attend the launch of the BNP's European election manifesto, but that I will not be told where or when it is, not until a few hours beforehand. I will also have the chance to interview Nick Griffin, the BNP leader but, again, the timing of this will remain vague for fear of "sabotage". So it is that I find myself at a "redirection point", the Aldi carpark in Grays, Essex, from where I will be taken on ...

The hours are hellish, the travel gruelling, the emotional toll immeasurable: is it any wonder nobody wants to be a traditional country vet any more... Nigel Farndale visits 'All Creatures Great and Small' country and finds James Herriot is long gone Roll the words 'country vet' over your tongue. Only three syllables and three vowels, but all the resonance of a tuning fork. Twenty years ago, these words would have evoked James Herriot, the Dales vet turned best-selling author. All Creatures Great and Small, the long-running television series based on his semi-autobiographical novels, was as familiar and comforting as a log fire or a pot of tea. Farmers wore flat caps and spoke in broad accents, they were amusingly contrary and dour, and they always ...

Charley Boorman held Angelina Jolie as a baby and had starred in several Hollywood films before he left school. Yet today he's best known as Ewan McGregor's globe-trotting wing man. How will he fare travelling the world on his own? Nigel Farndale joins him in Nepal to find out Kathmandu has its own gravitational pull, for Western backpackers at least. They come to get stoned and sit on the steps of the temples, as their hippy forebears did, though nowadays they do it wearing Fat Face fleeces and listening to iPods. I am here to meet Charley Boorman and accompany him on the next leg of his round-the-world journey - into the foothills of the Himalayas - and I have been tracking his progress, mobile ...

Albert DeSalvo was always friendly to Ellen Junger, except for one 'incident'. She tells Nigel Farndale, in Belmont, about her terrifying encounter with the serial killer - and the murder mystery that has fascinated her family for decades Forty-one years after his capture, the Boston Strangler still has a unique hold on the American psyche. Other serial killers may have been responsible for more deaths, but none haunts the collective imagination quite like Albert DeSalvo, the carpenter who confessed to raping and murdering 13 women in their own homes between June 1962 and January 1964. It was partly to do with his efficiency. He worked quickly, on one occasion managing two murders on the same day - and he never left any sign of a ...

As the driver of the Ilie Nastase Campaign Jeep swerves violently to avoid a pothole that is only a few inches off being classified a crater, the former tennis star lurches sideways in his seat, checks his hair with his hand, turns to me and gives an exasperated shrug: 'See what I mean about the roads?' he says. 'Unbelievable.' We are driving at alarming speed down a colourless boulevard in Bucharest. The Jeep, a voluptuously upholstered Cherokee, stands out among the drab-looking Ladas, stray dogs and orange tractors. It has started to drizzle, and women who have scurried out on to cement-and-iron balconies to gather in their washing stop to stare as we pass. Perhaps they have heard that the Jeep has replaced the Ilie ...