Blog
-
What I wrote about before writing novels …
In my previous life I was a foreign correspondent. Going through a cupboard, I’ve just found a very, very old long article/diary I wrote while working in Africa, maybe in 1991, about a whole country full of lost, frightened people looking for a home – the aid workers no less than the people they were supposed to be aiding. Writing it, as I now recall, helped show me how lonely I also was in Africa. Here it is.
-
finished first draft!
-
Literary agent slates Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins
BBC reports an intriguing comment from major US literary agent Andrew Wylie…
-
Return to Absurdistan
Writing a book set during the Russian Revolution of 1917 is reminding me of the wild excesses of the country I knew in the 1990s, after a later revolution ended Soviet rule – a place my Russian friends always liked, wryly, to call “Absurdistan”.
-
Taking liberties with Russia’s greatest pre-revolutionary play
The novel I’m writing is set before and after the Russian Revolution, so I’ve been keen to go and see Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, one of my favourite plays, at the National Theatre. It’s a wonderful play, poignantly charting the decline of the gentry just before the events of 1917 itself. But it seems this production has problems – a tricksy, weirdly over-modernised script, ringing with anachronistic clangers from “Oh bollocks”, to “every single bloody time” and people earning “25 to 30K a year”. Having read the Telegraph’s delightfully hold-your-nose review (here), I’m not so sure I’ll be going after all …
-
The Peasants’ Revolt remembered, in Islington …
Tony Benn unveils an Islington People’s Plaque commemorating the Peasants’ Revolt.
-
“Philippa Gregory or Vanora Bennett this is not …”
Wondering whether to be pleased at this mention! Books Winnipeg Free Press – PRINT EDITION An unflinching portrait of a
-
Some ancestor of mine – a violinist?
-
Chekhov round my neck
Would someone please tell me the secret of a good short story?
-
How to eat to save your life (and soul)
Beginner’s guide to the medieval way of feasting (and fasting)
-
The Inns are alive with the sound of music
London barristers work in four enchanting patches of greenery, in tall, elegant (if austere) buildings – a quiet pleasure in the very heart of the city for anyone who knows them. But what else beside the law goes on at the Inns of Court?
-
My top five historical novels
If you define historical novels as broadly as I do – that is, as books that show people living in an earlier time, not simply as those written for the genre ghetto – then here are five of the best.
-
Making the front and back of my violin
For a whole week, from 9 to 5.30 every day, I carved out curves on the outside of the front and back of my violin. That’s getting on for 40 hours….and it’s not done yet.
-
Was Rasputin such a bad guy?
We think we know Rasputin, because we can all hum along to RA RA RASPUTIN, LOVER OF THE RUSSIAN QUEEN, IT WAS A SHAME HOW HE CARRIED ON … but is that how things really were?
-
My top summer read (so far)
Carsten Jensen’s extraordinary book, telling the story of four generations of salty Danish sea-dogs (and their women), has been a hit all over Scandinavia. Now I’ve read it, I can see exactly why.
-
Violinists
-
Violin
From listening to others making music to making my own violin, in one easy step