Typical mother-to-mother email, January weekday, 2015: ‘Thanks so much for helping out yesterday, Jamie had a great time with you all, thanks also for bringing his games kit home, let me know if you need me to help tomorrow… xx’ Emails and texts like this, flitting across the ether in their thousands, demonstrate the free-flowing
If you like to curl up by the fire with a proper, old-fashioned, saga-style tale about a boy and his elephant in Istanbul in the 1500s, The Architect’s Apprentice might be suitable for you. My heart sank slightly when the review copy arrived: a 452-page brick by an Orange-Prize-shortlisted Turkish author and ‘global speaker’ who
Recent text from a female friend. ‘I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ To which I reply, ‘But of course! Up there with the Dean of Westminster and Frank Gardner.’ The same day, walking in Kensington Gardens, another friend admits, ‘I think I’m in love with Neil MacGregor.’ We mourn the fact that MacGregor’s Wikipedia entry
Skulls, femurs, ribs, pelvises, piled on top of each other in a chaotic heap: this, Denise Inge discovered, was what she and her husband John were living on top of in their pretty house in Worcester Cathedral Close, into which they had recently moved when John became the diocesan bishop. The house is on top
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous Kinky (1992). What made that book so captivating was the young narrator’s sweet, naïve total acceptance of the chaotically nomadic existence her hippy mother brought her to in Morocco. The first-person voice was enchantingly concise,
Verb says to noun, ‘Would you like to conjugate?’ Noun replies, ‘No, I decline.’ A nice witticism for Latin-lovers brought up on L.A. Wilding’s Latin Course for Schools; but do today’s prep-school Latin pupils have any idea what a conjugation or a declension is? Some do and some don’t, is the answer, and it all
The result of Monday’s vote on women bishops, the Archbishop of York stipulated, must be greeted in silence, as is the convention at the General Synod. This, perhaps, was a misjudgment: it would have been more natural, surely, to allow an instantaneous mass-whooping for joy and an outbreak of uninhibited Anglican hugging, rather than to
For all would-be novelists whose stumbling block is that they can’t resist describing every single sensation in depth — the smell of a bedroom, the sound of a door closing, the feel of a sofa, the experience of getting in and out of a bath — and who therefore find it hard to push a
Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the first world war. How do they plant a fresh, haunting, horrifying image into our unwilling and saturated heads? We know it all: the trenches, the mud, the shell holes, the rats, the man plodding towards
Letter home from prep-school boy, c. 1949: ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy, last night was the school play. It was Hamlet. A lot of the parents had seen it before, but they laughed all the same.’ Guffaws from the audience at lines that are not supposed to be funny; total absence of laughter at lines that
The title, the subtitle, the author’s plain name, even the jacket’s photograph of a laughing old lady in sunglasses: none of these is particularly enticing. But the book itself is a delight. Written in the crisp present tense by a 90-year-old with a remarkably clear recollection of the trains of thought of her teenaged and
Author has late-blossoming romance with authoress, both divorcees, and they live together in a cramped house in Harrogate full of stepchildren and then buy a derelict summer house surrounded by vast maize fields in the Charente-Maritime, but are no good at DIY, and they make friends with the locals who help them build a walled
Peering over my son’s shoulder as he forced himself through a pile of practice IGCSE maths papers in readiness for this week’s exams, I was shocked both by the absence of pounds sterling and by the ardently international imaginary first names dreamed up by the question-setters. That ‘I’ stands for ‘international’ — and goodness, you’re
‘And we extend a special welcome to all our visitors here today.’ That’s the vicar speaking; and this Sunday is one of the two days in the year when you are likely to be one of those visitors. You’re spending Easter with in-laws or friends who live in the country. Easter wouldn’t feel like Easter
Here are some statistics about wartime fruit- and vegetable-growing in England which this book tells us. In 1942-3, there were 1,750,000 allotments, amounting to 100,000 acres, or an area the size of Rutland. But in a 1944 survey, it was discovered that only 34 per cent of urban gardens were growing fruit and vegetables, and
I read William Nicholson’s new novel in proof before Christmas. ‘The must-read book for 2013 for lovers of William Boyd and Sebastian Faulks,’ it said on the back. Well, I like Boyd and Faulks, but I positively love William Nicholson, so I found that come-on slightly grating. Then I saw what the publicity people meant.
The difficult thing about writing a memoir is this: how do you avoid numbing the reader with endless thumbnail sketches of the hundreds of characters who have crossed your path? It’s easier in a novel, where you might have seven to ten main characters and can take time to delve deeply into each one. In
Dressed up as a child-friendly, pocket-sized hardback, just the right size for a Christmas stocking and with a pretty front-cover illustration of two dear little children in a snowy fir forest, Inventing the Christmas Tree (Yale, £12.99) is actually a learned 90-page thesis on the history of the Christmas tree by the German author Bernd
An ordinary woman, rather like yourself.’ These were Peter Fleming’s words when he commissioned Jan Struther to write what became her ‘Mrs Miniver’ columns for the Times. Critics complained then, and have complained ever since, that Mrs Miniver is no ‘ordinary woman’. She rings the bell for tea, takes taxis everywhere, and has a second
It’s 2.43 a.m. Unable to sleep, you reach out into the night for company: literally. Out goes your arm, towards the radio on the bedside table, and you grope for the ‘on’ button. You bring the radio close to you: a hard, cold, rectangular cuddly toy with an aerial instead of ears, and you turn