Judith Flanders

Dogged does it

issue 15 October 2005

William Boyd has written a dozen novels and short stories in the past quarter-century. That makes him a fairly prolific author. Factor in a dozen screenplays realised (and another couple of dozen that were never made, for the usual inscrutable film-world reasons), and he seems properly Stakhanovite. But take a deep breath, because Boyd estimates that in his moments of leisure he has also written three-quarters of a million words or so of journalism.

Given this, it is rather startling to find, in the first 20 pages of this selection of essays and reviews, three references to his ‘laziness’ at school. Less surprising is to find that what it is he admires, as an adult, is doggedness (a favourite term), determination. In a review of Julian Schnabel’s film of the life of the graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat he writes, ‘There is no medium or longterm substitute for talent, hard work, elaboration and exploration of technique, intelligence, hard work, empathy, thought, virtuosity, hard work, and so on.

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