The end is nigh . . .
. . . I hope. The end of my novel that is. Another couple of weeks should do it. I have yet to decide on that very last sentence and it has set me thinking about how to end a novel. It’s almost as hard as starting one, even though the crime writer has the […]
Cheap thrills and guilty pleasures
I’ve just got back from a holiday in France – hence no blogging for a while – with a cold that turned into a sinus infection. Feeling low a day or two ago I got into a hot bath with a novel by Jeffery Deaver. If there is a writer who is the absolute polar […]
One-hit wonders
It was reading MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY by Winifred Watson that got me thinking about this. It’s usually a derogatory term, but I, for one, would rather have one hit than none at all. Alain-Fournier is the classic example of this with LE GRAND MEALNES. Death in the trenches of WWI ended his […]
Sylvia Plath never heard the Beatles
Ted Hughes mentions this in discussing the influences on her work, when he is being interviewed in THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS VOL 3. I found this an arresting thought as I had thought of her as being a sixties figure – her work still seems so modern – but of course she died in 1963. […]
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 […]