Kate Saunders: Female Friendship and a Good Death
How would you like to die? Some of us, if we think about this, would choose to die on a beach or a bluebell wood, perhaps, and some when asleep. Some would choose the calm of a hospice. I’ve been...
Why this is a golden age for children’s literature: ‘Children’s books are one of the most important forms of writing we have’
First published inThe Independent on 24/06/2015. The first book I read to myself was Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat – something I still recommend to learners – and the Cat’s wild anarchic humour has always struck me as...
Children’s Books Make Good Companions in a Crisis
As the time of coronavirus isolation began, some of my friends swore that this was the moment they would finally read all of Proust, or Dickens, or Finnegans Wake. Others have turned to Boccacio’s The Decameron, and Camus’s The Plague. But what most...
Beryl Bainbridge’s Historical Novels – Not A Delinquent Child
Introduction for the 2020 reissue by Abacus. The novels of Beryl Bainbridge are remarkable for many things but the feature that stuck in public memory is that, while five were short-listed for the Booker Prize, none won. Three of these...
Eva Ibbotson Short Stories
There are not many authors whom readers wish had written more, rather than fewer, novels but Eva Ibbotson is among them. Like Jane Austen, she wrote just six completed books: A Countess Below Stairs (1981), Magic Flutes (1982), Company of...
Introduction to the Vintage Books reissue of Foreign Affairs
Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs is one of the great works of comic fiction; it is also a profound meditation on being plain. This might seem a large claim to make given that no less a novelist than George Eliot addressed...