Stephen Joseph Theatre
Today is the first anniversary of my mother’s death. Like so many people these days, she doesn’t have a grave and she was unsentimental about the disposal of her ashes, simply requesting that they be scattered at the crematorium. Long before she was ill she used to say that she would like there to be […]
So I Have Thought of You
This is a collection of Penelope Fitzgerald’s letters and I was particularly anxious to read them, because I knew her. In fact I actually have a letter from her myself, tucked inside my copy of her marvellous biography of the Knox brothers. I’d written to tell her much I had enjoyed that and her novels […]
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
One of the disadvantages of becoming a writer is that you lose your innocence as a reader. I used to love to dive into a crime novel, suspending my critical faculties as I was swept along by the excitement of it all. That doesn’t happen so much these days. Now that I produce the stuff […]
Disposing of a library II
A few weeks ago it was my mother’s birthday (she would have been 83) and in memory of her I made a donation to Oxfam to help stock a library in a school. It seemed appropriate, in part because she valued education so highly, not least because she chose to leave school at sixteen and […]
London Library
I’ve written elsewhere on my web-site about independent libraries. I have always loved libraries. I treasure my membership of the London Library: it is one of my favourite places and certainly my favourite library. I’ve sometimes had a fantasy that I could secretly live there, hiding among the stacks, and emerging after closing time. The […]
Digging to America
I’ve read a number of Anne Tyler’s novels and enjoyed them. I think LADDER OF YEARS and BREATHING LESSONS are particularly good. (As I write this, the cat has just climbed into my in tray – is he trying to tell me something?). But I wasn’t so sure about AN AMATEUR MARRIAGE, nor about the […]
Out of Sheer Rage
The full title is OUT OF SHEER RAGE: IN THE SHADOW OF D. H. LAWRENCE by Geoff Dyer and I am relishing it. Dyer set out to write a book about Lawrence. What he actually wrote was a book about trying to write a book about Lawrence. This sounds tiresomely post-modern, but it’s not. It’s […]
Cookbooks
The point where comfort eating and comfort reading meet. A week or two ago I threw a big party for a special family birthday and did lunch for over thirty people. There was much list-making and anxious scanning of cookery books beforehand. This set me thinking about cookery books as a branch of literature. My […]