Blog

For the Evening Standard’s round-up of the best books of 2012, click here. I can thoroughly endorse Miriam Gross’s recommendation of Bertie, A Life of Edward VII by Jane Ridley. Extracts from the personal correspondence of the royals provides a revealing insights into family relationships and politics, and the results are none too flattering, especially when it comes to Victoria and…
» Continue Reading

Debi Alper’s advice for writers is to develop the hind of a rhino. Learning to deal with rejection is part of that process. Yesterday the BBC published this short quiz about rejection   which serves to prove the point. Enjoy!   

Not for shopping, but for shortlists. The Costa shortlist is out! Last year’s winning novel, A Song for Achilles, was one the few books I loved so much that when I got to the end I went straight to the beginning and started again. Always offering an alternative approach, for the first time, two graphic novels…
» Continue Reading

Yesterday, to mark the occasion of the manufacture of the last typewriter, the BBC published an article about people – author Will Self among them – for whom a computer is not their first choice when it comes to writing. High on the list of reasons is the typewriter offers no time-wasting distractions…   

“Forget the peel. Get to the banana.” Chuck Wendig.

“You can’t edit a blank page.” Joanne Penn, The Creative Penn.

On 21st July 1977 Anthony Penrose lost his embarrassing mother – someone who had been known to appear bare-breasted when he brought his friends home to tea; someone who could barely darn a sock; occasional writer of cookery books – soon to discover that he had been cheated.  Born Elizabeth Miller, she would reinvent herself as Lee Miller and…
» Continue Reading

I’ll admit it: I love cemeteries. Not because I’m a morbid person, but because the stories found on gravestones tend to carry a little more magic than ideas that start life inside an author’s head, simply because they are true. Until they grow wings.       At the Royal Hospital Burial Ground in Chelsea we find two examples of…
» Continue Reading

Having just caught up with Jen Campbell’s lovely blog, and read about a poem called, ‘what is the most shop-lifted book in the world?’ I decided to look the answer up. The answer: The Bible. The most shop-lifted book of all time? Still The Bible. Where is your imagination? I had hoped for something that would be…
» Continue Reading

Ian Rankin brought so many perfect sound-bites to BBC’s Imagine that I didn’t exhaust all my notes in one post. He drew from his father’s outlook, a ‘wonderful liar’ who could turn the smallest nick in his knee into a bullet wound.  He spoke also about writing as a way of making sense of the world, and more specifically…
» Continue Reading