The phenomenon by which groups of animals all suddenly begin to copy a new behaviour – like blue-tits learning to open milk bottle tops – has been termed morphic resonance. Something very similar to the blue-tits’ discovery has recently been...
If you were to ask what place in Britain has inspired most writers, you would probably guess London; Devon comes a close second. So many authors past and present have been drawn to (and have drawn on) the county that...
“I love England in a heat-wave” says Leon Tallis in Ian McEwan;’s Atonement, “It’s a different country. All the rules change.” As the summer of 2018 continues to break records for its prolonged absence of rain (last month was the...
Cold, magic, adventure, family, comedy, fires in the dark – we all know what makes for a wonderful Christmas story. The bulging sack of children’s books could cause Santa’s sleigh to sink. Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton’s deliciously droll Emily...
If you have seen recent films Dunkirk or Darkest Hour, you’d be forgiven for thinking that World War Two was a struggle in which half the human race was missing. Its soldiers and strategists, politicians and prisoners, workers and wounded are all men,...
When Michael Franks won the annual Wingate Prize yesterday for his memoir the Mighty Franks, a dazzling portrait of an eccentric Los Angeles family, it set the seal on what looks to be an annus mirabilis for a new kind of heroine....
“Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story.” If I had to trace the death of the novel – or at least a prolonged attempt to kill it – to a single phrase, this is it. EM Forster wrote...
Few readers will fail to spot this has been a golden year for children’s books. With Philip Pullman’s magisterial return to the world of His Dark Materials in La Belle Sauvage, and Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s rapturously received nature-fest The Lost...
A celebration of the life and work of acclaimed novelist Helen Dunmore. A wonderful friend and literary inspiration.
Stories have the power, which Dickens above all used, to make the haves see the have-nots as people. My burglar was not a beast, but a person.