Hitchcock

My shrinking waistline

The measurements on men's trousers are an outrageous lie; plus why we should ban canal boats

Let sex get divorced from violence

Why are sex and violence bracketed together as bad things in films? Surely they're morally different?

Hiding their light under bushel of cash

Notebook: State-school failures find their own way to success

America: home of the brave

Notebook: What High School Musical tells us about our transatlantic cousins

Teenage piercing and climbing the social ladder

What age should teenagers be allowed to have piercings? Plus how working-class habits are moving into the middle class

Why stolen lifebelts give me a sinking feeling

I have a personal barometer of national turpitude and it is how long it takes before all the lifebelts in Shadwell Basin are stolen

Why the iPod generation are emotional wrecks

Notebook: Music is making drama quenns of us all

My golden opportunity in Paris

Notebook: either this woman was the worst trickster in Paris or, like me, was a blameless passer-by

Euro 2008: go for the plucky plumbers

There's only team to support now with England absent; Indiana Jones and David Cameron

My baseball cap says 'Dork Uni'

The class war by other means; and branded university merchandise could be the new frontier

Cigars: the perfect capitalist prop

A big cigar impels you to dispatch children up chimneys or mismanage a merchant bank