The Old Friary

Well now, this is a sort of farewell. An au revoir more than an adieu but a valediction all the same. This morning I switch off most of my connections with the outside world, for I have work to do. I must deliver a book to my publishers by the end of April or my […]

Sad news from TV-land. Well sad for me and for some others. It may well have you skipping about like a lamb on ketamine, trilling with joy. Our masters at ITV have decided that there shan’t be a fourth series of the television drama Kingdom. I am sorry because it was such a pleasure making […]

I like LA. There I said it. When Europeans come to America they are supposed to be divided into New York or Los Angeles types. When the English writers W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood crossed the Atlantic in the late 30s Auden stayed in Manhattan and Isherwood went to LA where he remained for […]

Extraordinary thing. Look at this: http://bit.ly/jraEP I was having lunch with my literary agent yesterday and I said, mostly as a joke, that I had it in mind to blog a confession. I would publicly admit that I read fewer than one in twenty of the books to which I gave approving quotes for dust […]

I walked into town this morning, four and a half miles gently downhill into the bowl of London, the chalk basin where Soho, Mayfair, Bloomsbury, Marylebone and divers other of the villages that constitute the West End have their jostling, bumptious beings. There’s that thing in the air. That thing. That thing that goes with […]

A deadline met: such relief. You would think that after so many years I might have mastered the art – not of writing – but of putting myself in a position to write. Many writers are, like me, fascinated by process. From an early age I wanted to know whether authors worked by morning or night, […]