All the way down eastern European rivers such as the Danube and the Elbe are buried so-called ‘hunger stones’, laid down during droughts...

Rather in the same vein as the extraordinary size that the venue would have had to have been if everyone who says they were there,...

Happy days are here again. Writers of all shapes and sizes are finally back on the road again in front of audiences in town halls, shops ...

‘If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree,’, said Albert Einstein ‘it will spend its whole life thinking it is stupid.’ He is...

‘Every ass,’ runs an old English expression, ‘likes to hear himself bray.’ Not always. Not this old ass. A few weeks ago, the company...

It was surprisingly emotional. Sixteen months of my life came to an end on Wednesday afternoon at about 4.30, when the Danish gaff-rigged...

If you wanted to be an officer in the British Army back in the day, you had to pass a selection board down in Westbury, Wiltshire, called...

‘Maybe this time,’ sings Liza Minnelli in the 1972 film, Cabaret, at the beginning of a wistful song of almost certainly dashed dreams....

Every writer bangs on about what happens when the words don’t come. It’s called writer’s block. But no one talks enough about what...

I subscribe to the Mark Twain dictum that a ‘classic’ is a book that ‘people praise but don’t read’. We are frequently told, for example,...

None of us have a clue. Soap operas reveal their developing plots- if that is the right word- slowly, and the shifts and changes are the...

Having written somewhere between a third and a half of a million of them in the last year, I gave words a week off whilst on holiday last...

They say you can’t but, believe me, you can. There are authors, painters, sculptors, rock groups and god knows who else who manage little...

No one actually buys a filing cabinet. Filing cabinets just appear in your house one day and, like that annoying Patek Philippe...

There are 1,267,069 words in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, 9,609,000 characters spread over 3031 mesmerising pages. I expect that you...