I’ve just returned from a three-day visit to the Port Eliot Festival, in St Germans, Cornwall. It’s hard to put into words just how good and right the place and atmosphere felt. On the last stage of the drive you wind through a series of roads that alternately give views across small fields that are…
The beauty of books is that you can read them anywhere, at any time.
But is there an ideal place to do it? Indoors, outdoors, under a tree, in a favourite chair, on a train, or on the loo?
Landscapes, imagined and remembered, have always played a central role in literature.
The fascinating relationship between writers and the British landscape is currently explored in a new exhibition at The British Library: Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands. Here are some thoughts it inspired.
Once upon a time a young woman opened a bookshop…
The dust has settled and the shoot-out at the literary salon is over. Julian Barnes has outgunned The Sisters Brothers and the rest of the not-so-magnificent five. The critics and literati have grumbled and sniped, whilst that endangered breed, the booksellers have rubbed their hands with glee at a welcome boost to their sales.
Just entered a Guardian blog challenge to try to make poems from book titles. My effort’s below. Here’s the link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/oct/06/compose-a-poem-from-book-titles The Poetry of book titles As I walked out one midsummer morning Neither here nor there Dreams of leaving Linger awhile Landscape and memory, Like water for chocolate, Different Seasons Clinging to the wreckage…
There’s a lot to put you off Twitter. People spreading hate. Bots pretending to be people spreading hate. People wanting to police the thoughts and comments of strangers. Attack mobs flaring up. Oversharing. Utter inanity and mundanity. I get why lots of people leave or never join in the first place. But, there is also…
Found this indirectly via ‘Little White Lies’ – an excellent film magazine – in the current Apocalypse Now issue. “Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenanciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that…
As a teenager in the eighties my hometown seemed blessed with a surprising variety of record shops, but I always saw Revolver as the one true emporium of cool.
Why is it that a certain kind of person in this country finds it so hard to accept that children exist? It’s not as if they are a rarity. If you have or know children, you’ve probably encountered the type. They’re often male, but not exclusively, usually fairly well-off and long past their own youth.…
