Books features
Antony Sher: Year of the Mad King - extractTuesday, 13 March 2018
In 1982 Antony Sher played the Fool to Michael Gambon’s King in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of King Lear. Shortly after, he came back to Stratford to play Richard III, for which he won the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best... Read more... |
'In order to write my book I had to kill Jane Austen'Sunday, 11 March 2018
My heroine would not have appeared in a Jane Austen novel. Brilliant, arch and incisive though Austen was – as deft in dissecting the economics of romance as in laying bare the lies told by the human heart – for better or worse, she still sent all... Read more... |
Stephen Walsh's Debussy - A Painter in Sound - extractMonday, 05 March 2018
All this time La Mer had been brewing. It was almost a year since Debussy had written to Colonne tentatively offering him “some orchestral pieces” he was working on, and to his publisher, Jacques Durand, a fortnight later listing the titles of the... Read more... |
Rhidian Brook on The Killing of Butterfly JoeThursday, 01 March 2018
When I was 23 I had a job selling butterflies in glass cases in America. I worked for a guy who, as well as being a butterfly salesman, had ambitions to be America’s first Pope (an ambition he ditched on account of him wanting to marry). I drove all... Read more... |
John Tusa: 'the arts must make a noise' - interviewThursday, 22 February 2018
In our era of 24/7 news, downloadable from anywhere in the world at the touch of an app, it's hard to remember that not so very long ago the agenda was set by the BBC - the Home Service as Radio 4 was then called, and BBC TV, just the one channel,... Read more... |
Philip Pullman: La Belle Sauvage review - not quite equalSunday, 22 October 2017
La Belle Sauvage, the first instalment of Philip Pullman’s eagerly-awaited new trilogy The Book of Dust, opens in the Trout, a rambling Thames-side pub on the outskirts of Port Meadow, north of Oxford. Here all kinds drink: scholars, labourers,... Read more... |
Extract: Peter Brook - Tip of the Tongue: Reflections on Language and MeaningSunday, 10 September 2017
A long time ago when I was very young, a voice hidden deep within me whispered, "Don’t take anything for granted. Go and see for yourself." This little nagging murmur has led me to so many journeys, so many explorations, trying to live together... Read more... |
Emma Dibdin: 'Being scared of something is a sign you should write about it'Saturday, 05 August 2017
When I began writing my first novel four years ago, there were a few ideas that had coalesced in my mind. I knew I wanted to write a thriller about mental illness through the eyes of a young woman whose family had been defined by it; someone... Read more... |
Lisa Jewell: 'I’d never killed anyone before'Sunday, 30 July 2017
I started writing my first novel in 1995. I was 27 and I’d just come out of a dark, dark marriage to a controlling man who’d kept me more or less locked away from the world. I had no front door key, no phone, was not allowed to see my friends or my... Read more... |
h.Club 100 Awards: Publishing and Writing - it's not all about the mainstreamTuesday, 25 July 2017
For more than three decades I reported on the publishing industry as a business journalist. The books, the deals, the authors and the publishers, plus the bookshops that sold then. When I started out in 1984, Waterstone’s was new and exciting,... Read more... |
Eureka: novelist Anthony Quinn on completing his acclaimed trilogySunday, 02 July 2017
I am intrigued by those writers who plan their novels with the bristling rigour of a military strategist, drilling their characters like counters on a model battlefield. And impressed that they seem in absolute control of the direction their story... Read more... |
Muhsin Al-Ramli: 'During Saddam’s regime at least we knew who the enemy was' - interviewSunday, 28 May 2017
Saddam Hussein’s name is never mentioned in The President’s Gardens, even though he haunts every page. The one time that the reader encounters him directly, he is referred to simply by his title. In a novel of vivid pictures, the almost... Read more... |
