A new set of paintings have been added to the Other Projects page.
May 182013
May 152013
One of the strands of my new book is the year 1977, when a leading character was a student in the mad maelstrom that was London. I chose to write about that year and this malleable young person stuck back there as it was so pivotal – with the raw new energy of punk and [...]
May 022013
“Fostered alike by beauty and by fear” as Wordsworth intoned so long ago. How those words from my youthful studies came back suddenly to haunt me. Elation and depression combined in equal parts as on Saturday 20 April 2013 I returned to my home village of Long Buckby in Northamptonshire and drew up to the [...]
Apr 202013
After several months of false starts and frustrations, I hope to have finally come upon the subject matter for my next novel. Having spent untold hours connecting nothing much together, knitting with thin air, making rough globes out of bits of discarded paper, it seemed I might never write again. I was preparing for the [...]
Apr 082013
It’s not long to go now. The new Baz Luhrmann film of F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby will be seen by an eager public from 10 May 2013. It promises much, with a stellar cast. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the mysterious millionaire of the title. An innocent faced Toby Maguire plays his bemused neighbour Nick, while [...]
Feb 032013
As we know, to be creative or successful in many spheres requires looking at things in a different way. And as I caught up with the recent news from David Bowie, it brought to mind the surprises that he and other Davids have sprung upon us over the years too. Centuries ago a huge block [...]
Dec 162012
Some books and short stories seem to lend themselves especially to being read when the nights draw in and the cold weather arrives. Obviously, ghost stories abound at this time of year – as they have done ever since families and friends closed in around the warmth of the hearth in olden days and tried [...]
Dec 022012
Growing up near Northampton, the “peasant poet” John Clare was a mysterious figure from my childhood. The town’s reference library had odd books and records dedicated to him and in a picture his face in old age was like a wall of moss, with fuzzy outlines. The town church had a seat with a plaque [...]
Nov 182012
If writers are ever discouraged, they should perhaps take a crumb of comfort in the fate of the seminal nineteenth century novel by Herman Melville, Moby Dick. Though Melville had enjoyed a degree of critical and commercial success with his earlier novels, his largest and most ambitious work, Moby Dick, received poor reviews in his [...]
Nov 102012
Elsewhere on my website, you will see that I have cited Josephine Hart as one of my key influences. Like my other heroes, it is both the life and the work that have intrigued me. I felt compelled to write something now as her grieving widow Maurice Saatchi appeared in several newspapers and magazines recently, [...]