I recently came across a literary quotation by Hugh Grant. Asked by an interviewer about whether he wanted to write, he came up with an impressively honest answer. ‘It’s actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel...
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First, an apology. This is a small story. It is about a village, its school, some houses and a white line. It would not be out of place in one of the quieter episodes of The Archers. To some, the...
Read moreIt has gone. The piece of work which has occupied over the past couple of years, a novel, has left my desk to make its way in the blustery, chilly outside world. Almost certainly it will be back, nagging for...
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I write this report on Christmas day in the library of Oxburgh Hall, an agreeable late-medieval moated house in Norfolk where I have been a guest for these past five days. By the end of this week, I am confident...
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In about 1997, I was sharing a bottle of wine with my good friend and neighbour Roger Deakin in the garden of Walnut Tree Farm, his house in the Waveney Valley. Although his life was going through a period of...
Read moreI was born into a family that loved horses. My father was an international show-jumper and amateur jockey. My mother was a brilliant horsewoman who had ridden all her life. My brother Philip and I hadn't been long in this...
Read moreTalking to the New York Times in 1936, Cole Porter took an unsentimental view of his work when it was completed. 'The moment the curtain rises on the opening night, I say to myself: “There she goes” and I’ve bid...
Read moreToday's the birthday of Bob Dylan. Here's a piece I wrote in 2005 when Dylan was nominated (unsuccessfully - again) for the Nobel Prize: It was an odd kind of funeral. The deceased had lived a full and somewhat rackety...
Read moreEvery now and then, perhaps once or twice a month, a new cause for concern is discovered. From some distant campus, a research paper is published which reveals that something we had previously taken for granted is, in fact, deeply...
Read moreIt was April 1998. I was living in a flat in London after my marriage had gone belly-up. I had been working on my novel Kill Your Darlings and was so stuck that it felt as if it was killing me....
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