Books
Barometer
Escape committees An LSE/Institute for Government report estimated the cost of Scottish independence at £2.7 billion, a sum arrived at…
Dear Mary
Q. My dear English husband has never mastered the knack of timing his interventions in conversation. He hesitates politely, and…
Port and daughters
Port, or Hermitage? This does not refer to personal consumption. I was trying to remember Meredith’s Egoist, in which one…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that inheritance tax ‘shouldn’t be paid by people who’ve worked hard and saved…
Diary
The week leading up to publication is a strange time for any author. You subject yourself to doing everything from…
Sex by the book
Is there any kind of love that novelists still can’t touch?
Diary
As any author will tell you, literary festivals differ widely. If you are invited to Willy Dalrymple’s Jaipur Festival, with…
Dear Mary
Q. I gave a copy of Dan Russel the Fox by Somerville and Ross to a couple I know to be…
How the MPs’ expenses scandal proves the wisdom of Alain de Botton
Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be nicer so that fewer people hate me, I remember my old friend Alain…
By the book – The perils of snooping
The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling…
The ghosts of crises past – and the gambler’s strategy for crises to come
Top of my Christmas reading pile is Saving the City by Richard Roberts, a new account of the largely forgotten…
Diary
They say nothing beats the feeling of seeing your book in print. But for me, the proudest moment was presenting…
Door into the dark
Seamus Heaney’s poetry from the other side of Northern Ireland’s divide
A novelist’s view
Do writers really need inspiring landscapes? Or the opposite?
Be more tortoise
Five lessons from my new pet
It’s the summer of the topless man,and there’s nothing we can do to stop it
Topless men. What does that mean, then? I was opposite one on the tube the other day, heading north from…
A glass of wine with Dickens
Which is the greatest novel in the English language? Let us review the candidates: Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The…
dear mary your problems solved
Q. I have far too many friends to be able to invite them all to my forthcoming book launch. How…
