misc.
Meg Rosoff
My friend kills people.
The premise of Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good was fantastic — self-congratulating North London liberals get stuck when ‘Being Good’ suddenly demands more than the occasional donation to UNICEF. The book wasn’t fabulous, but I thought about it this weekend while entertaining three of my favourite people – one of whom (the well-read, funny, [...]
Naming fictional characters.
She’s taking shape ever-so-slowly in my head and it’s time to name her. This should be simple, but it might be worth mentioning that my husband and I took six weeks to name our daughter. We actually received a letter from the council saying that if we didn’t register our baby, they’d assign her an [...]
QUIET PLEASE!!!!
I consider my personality to have been formed by Dr Seuss, and I have no complaints about that. The Cat in The Hat, with his sly anarchy (“I know some good tricks…I will show them to you, your mother will not mind at all if I do,”) remains to this day my role model. But [...]
Fifty-four
I know I’m prejudiced, but I don’t think it helps to be a huge success early in life. Too much struggling to keep up the good work, too many people saying (cf, Woody Allen) that they liked the earlier funnier stuff better, too much of a sense that life is a long, slow dwindling of [...]
£190 million Michelangelo found behind sofa
Doesn’t it just figure. I’m desperately combing garage sales for thirty years in search of a Raphael or a first edition of Ulysses, and some Airforce Lieutenant Colonel in Buffalo, NY gets lucky in his own living room. Turns out the painting came into the family via a German Baroness who gave it as a [...]
The Writer’s Shed
Unlike most of my colleagues, the thought of a writing shed at the bottom of the garden fills me with horror. I want to be near the front door (in case any of the junk I’ve ordered online arrives), near the telephone (in case someone with only my landline phones to say I’ve just won [...]
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