It all begins with an idea.

“WE DO TREAT books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture,” writes Ali Smith, in Artful…

“The Secret Life is an inadvertent autobiography,” Andrew O’Hagan told me…

In the middle of June a couple of years ago, I packed books, pinboards, a laptop, wellies…

Big Jake and Briggsy wait for Rory under the loading bay overhang behind Littlewoods department store.

WHILE READING Geoff Dyer’s latest unmissable blend of new journalism, memoir, and rumination…

I rocked from foot to foot in the middle of the Widows of Culloden collection…

N A LETTER about Finnegans Wake to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver in 1926, James Joyce wrote…

I’ve often remarked that I’m a slow writer, but I’m not sure folks really get how slow.

I looked up from my reading at the field outside the window. The hay bales that had lain…

Finally I’ve found time to post the complete list of 28 spring book suggestions…

In February 1967, the Iranian poet and filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad died in a car crash in Tehran.

In September 2015,I read an essay by John McPhee…

In 1988, my second posting in store management for the fashion chain Laura Ashley took me to Edinburgh.

One year later at her mother’s funeral Helen will realize how their decision to call it a day…

One October, I recommended some eerie books––one per day, in the hope…

On May 28, 1959, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency launched a Jupiter Medium Range Ballistic Missile…

Standing stones punctuate the Scottish landscape, ancient markers of a centuries-old metaphysical debate.

A year after my parents separated, I saw my father on the other side of a narrow street. He walked straight by without any gesture of greeting.