The Blitz Spirit?
Last year comparisons were often made between the pandemic and the Blitz in WWII. I thought of that recently as I read Margaret Kennedy’s Where Stands a Winged Sentry, her splendid memoir of the months between May and September 1940, when German invasion appeared imminent and it seemed likely that Britain would lose the war. […]
I’ve started, so I’ll finish?
Certainly there was a time when I felt duty-bound to finish a book once I had started it. I am not quite sure when that stopped. Certainly I felt that way as a conscientious student doing an English degree. Once I had started something – Paradise Lost, War and Peace, all Shakespeare’s plays which I […]
Writing in lockdown, or Cassandra redux
Or should that be NOT writing, or at least, not writing a great detail. Last year’s tally included two short stories and a fair amount of work on a novel, including a lot of research and a synopis. However to date I have only written about 5,000 words of that novel. Not a lot to […]
Sarah Ward, also writing as Rhiannon Ward, is my guest
I loved Sarah’s first four novels which were police procedurals set in the Peak District where we both live. Her most recent novel, The Quickening, is a gripping and atmospheric Gothic tale, published under the name Rhiannon Ward. It’s a pleasure to interview her. Your most recent novel, The Quickening, is a new departure. Where […]
Favourite books on how to write
I’ve got far more books on writing than I can care to admit to. There’s some justification. Some of them have been essential tools in learning how to write. And then too writing is a solitary occupation and it’s good to have a few old friends to turn to when I grind to a halt. […]
Be afraid . . .
It’s nearly Halloween so now seems a good time to review an absolutely cracking ghost story, Strangers (1987), by Japanese writer, Taichi Tamada. It is a novella and can easily be read in a couple of hours. The narrator, a middle-aged scriptwriter, divorced, disillusioned, takes a sentimental journey to the Toyko suburb where he grew […]
Surrealism has caught up with us
Last week I was reading Inez Holden’s diary of the Blitz, It was Different at the Time, published in 1943. This is from the entry of a day after a night of particularly heavy bombardment: ‘One morning I walked back through the park, and saw the highest branches of a tree draped with . . . […]