My Happy Place
Like everyone else, I can’t wait to get away – to Provence, Bavaria, Tuscany – wherever. Not that this green and pleasant land isn’t a chequerboard of historic…
A running buffet of the thoughts and ideas that crowd into a writer’s life.
Like everyone else, I can’t wait to get away – to Provence, Bavaria, Tuscany – wherever. Not that this green and pleasant land isn’t a chequerboard of historic…
I cannot read in my dreams. It’s nothing to do with my eyes getting tired with age. I have never been able to read in my dreams. The…
Ardmore Endings struck me as a very American book. For instance, a British reader cannot fail to note the distance between places, and the characters’ nonchalant attitude to…
A good many actors refuse to read notices in the press about their performances. I suppose it’s hardly surprising that members of a profession, whose business is the…
Coincidences by Ian Thomson There was a boy in my form at school with the same name as me. Exactly the same name. There was no intrusive ‘p’…
Michael Reidy’s The Rock Pool is suffused with nostalgia, the aching remembrance of rose-tinted, irrecoverable time, the bitter-sweet longing for a return home. ‘Home’ in the novel is…
PART ONE I enjoyed the first instalment of the 2007 version of Oliver Twist this evening. BBC Drama at its best. Sumptuous production values. A brilliant adaptation: the…
Ten years or so ago, Fiskerton made his first appearance on Facebook. Now,it is a truth universally acknowledged that a gentleman, living alone, must be in need of a valet-cum-butler, so I invented one for myself.
All is True Bill Bryson pointed out that we know very little about Shakespeare’s life and if you look back through the excellent work of Peter Ackroyd, Ivor…
I like short stories. It’s a mystery to me why some publishers have such a downer on them. It seems that they are not happy to countenance publishing…