Writing
My life as a writer
It was roughly 55 years ago, at the tail end of the 1960s, that I took the monumental decision to…
Bernard Cornwell: ‘I don’t believe in writer’s block’
They say never meet your heroes, but Bernard Cornwell didn’t disappoint. Knowing I’m a superfan, the events team at The…
Julie Burchill, remembered
When I was told that a newspaper had asked someone to write my obituary, my first instinct was excitement. I’m…
Bring back the book launch!
It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la…
How The Spectator shaped John Buchan
Amid the hullabaloo attending the 150th anniversary of the birth of John Buchan on 26 August – the walks and…
Why you should never trust a travel writer
After one of Jeffrey Archer’s minor tangles with the absolute truth, his friend the late Barry Humphries remarked: ‘We all…
Beware taking up running in your fifties
Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the…
Don’t write off literary fiction yet
I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good…
How I took on Microsoft’s AI – and won
‘This is an assault!’ I screamed in my study, oblivious to the fact that my husband had a guest downstairs.…
The exquisite vanity of the male sports writer
A good place to catch the highbrow sports journalist in action is the ‘Pseuds Corner’ column of PrivateEye, where he…
The lure of the spy novel
Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film…
The expensive business of quoting poetry
Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of…
Pity the restaurant critic
An atom is made of protons, electrons and neutrons, and protons are made of quarks, and a quark is the…
What will become of George Orwell’s archives?
The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the…
A.A. Milne and the torturous task of writing
For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month…
Letter from Thailand
Many of my friends, stranded by the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, have temporarily given up their film projects and…
Down the rabbit hole
Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter
The reactionary bohemian
Modestly brilliant, dedicatedly hedonistic — Jeremy Clarke was a complete one-off
Diary
The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside…
Letter from Mongolia
The first time I went to Mongolia was in 2014, when I travelled across the country with the actress Michelle…
Written out
How success kills friendships
Blood lines
Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?
A vroom of one’s own
Oh how I loved my old Mini
