Claire Keegan: ‘Men and Women’
I listened recently to an interview with Teju Cole on the subject of the author and photographer’s favourite film, Kieslowski’s Red, which starts off with a rumination on the nature – and, especially, on the timing – of favourite things in general. “The impression I have,” Cole says, “is that there’s a certain timing that...
A drink or two
Jack slipped under the counter and closed the door to the bar; propped behind it was a picture of Churchill, glass cracked, and in front beer-crates lined the wall leading straight to Georgie. Her buttocks strained against the seam of her skirt as she bent over and counted bottles. Jack tiptoed forward – one slap...
Day 38
Jean-Marc Vallée’s adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, scripted by Nick Hornby and starring Reese Witherspoon, is now out in UK cinemas. It tells the story of Strayed’s 1,100-mile wilderness walk towards personal discovery along the Pacific Crest Trail. Witherspoon has been nominated for Best Actress in the Screen Actors’ Guild, the Golden Globes, the BAFTA Awards...
Philip Teir: Question everything
Philip Teir’s debut novel The Winter War chips away at Scandinavia’s much-trumpeted model society by examining individual lives in a well-to-do but barely functional Finnish-Swedish Helsinki family as they scrabble for meaning and identity. Max Paul is a retired lecturer on the point of turning 60, who is working on a biography of pioneering sociobiologist...
Marjorie Barnard: ‘The Persimmon Tree’
I have so many favourite stories! As I wander through them in my mind, the styles are so different, but each one has me excited me in some way. Sometimes it is perception, seeing beyond the familiar or the surface of things; sometimes it is the use of language; sometimes it is empathetic characterisation; sometimes...
Making history live and breathe
I’ve always loved history, from the dry, factual interpretation-board-in-a-castle kind, to the Young Sherlock Holmes imaginary Victorian cults and poison blow-pipe kind. But it was when I was doing my masters in Shakespearean Studies that I realised I could never become a historian. This was the first time I’d studied literature in its historical context....
Ghosts of New York
I have an American heiress to thank for leading me to Edith Wharton. I was a teenager – lank-haired, history addict, eye for drama – and I was visiting Blenheim Palace with my parents when I caught sight of a creature from the Gilded Age. Consuelo Vanderbilt, wife of the 9th Duke of Marlborough, looked...
