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I’m sometimes asked how long a novel should be. I begin by talking about the length of various pieces of string, but then, after a little humming and hawing say something like this: Somewhere [...]

We’ve just spent three days with friends in a remote village in the Klein Karoo. We were alerted to the plague of fieldmice they’re experiencing when a solitary mouse emerged surreptitiously from [...]

On Page 382 of Colm Toibin’s The Magician, a biographical novel which takes as its subject the life of one of the twentieth century’s most revered writers, the German Thomas Mann, he has Mann say [...]

The curtains are drawn around the corner bed diagonally opposite me in our ward, and have been for some time. Now a plaintive cry arises from the occupant, an elderly gent with a military bearing [...]

She’s loud, she could very well have had a drink or two too many – and there seems to be nothing the matter with her. Which is puzzling, since we’re both in A&E at Bedford Hospital, [...]

The patient in the bed nearest the bathroom is, of course, old. He’s also confused. “Where,” he asks in a north country accent, “am I?” The nurse at his bedside, sorting out his medication in a [...]

My stream of Monday ruminations was rudely interrupted a couple of months ago by illness – and an unexpected visit to the Elizabeth Ward of Bedford Hospital. Over the next eleven days all I had [...]

We’ve often quoted a guru who urged writers to use details that were “specific, accurate and honest”. The use of that last adjective has always puzzled me. How can a detail be “honest”? I’ve come [...]

“The last paragraph, in which you tell what the story is about, is almost always best left out.” This was Irwin Shaw’s advice to young writers, and I think of it often. We are always tempted to [...]