reading
These I have loved
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
High life
Welcome to 2015, the year that speaking and writing freely had to stop. Anything that might cause trauma to anyone…
Farewell notebook
So we are all going to have to pay for fatties to have stomach bands and bypasses, are we? It…
An open book
Kindle highlights turn the lonely pleasures of reading into a communal event
Real life
‘Question 2. In which year did the Berlin Wall come down?’ shouted the quizmaster. And then he repeated this with…
Diary
The week leading up to publication is a strange time for any author. You subject yourself to doing everything from…
A book for all ages
The genesis of The Road to Middlemarch was a fine article in the New Yorker about Rebecca Mead’s unsuccessful search…
Six of the best
When one notices the first symptoms of senile dementia (forgetting names, trying to remember the purpose of moving from one…
Are you sitting comfortably…
Robert Gore-Langton on Oxford’s new Story Museum, which aims to put stories into young lives deprived of books
