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What happened isn’t the story. Events don’t make stories. So the memoirist who protests that all she wants to write is “what actually happened” is missing the point. Indeed, the novelist who [...]

Hilary Mantel was memorialised at a gathering in Southwark Cathedral last week. The great and the good were in attendance. Zadie Smith read an extract from one of her books; Mark Rylance, who [...]

Writing, we all agree, is a lonely business. We toil away in solitude, dreaming up our characters, and plotting our stories. We gnaw at our thumbnails waiting for inspiration to strike. As [...]

Trolling through the internet, I came across something called “survivorship bias”. Have you heard of it? Wikipedia puts it very succinctly: “Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical [...]

By now you might have realised that I’m a dreamer. I return to wakefulness most mornings with the shreds of dreams falling about me, like confetti on a groom barely conscious of his duty.  Now, I [...]

As a child my parents possessed a large radiogram. In the middle sat a turntable, below a radio, and on either side two narrow cupboards for long playing records. I don’t believe they cared at [...]

I’m not sure where this is going to lead me today, but I’m going to take a chance and risk writing something that might end up going nowhere useful at all. Bear with me. Let’s start with the idea [...]

A friend recently sent me a link to the acceptance speech given by the winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature, Olga Tokarczuk. It takes the form of a meditation on fiction, on truth and, [...]

I’ve always regretted having a memory that dredges up numbers, but not conversations or passages of writing that I’ve read and loved. Memory – not only of conversation and texts, but also of [...]

I was listening recently to a programme on the radio in which musicians were talking about their relationship with their instruments. These were all professionals, leading violinists or cellists. [...]

Together with what sometimes appears to be the rest of the world, I have followed the debate around ChatGPT – the artificial intelligence search engine and chatbot –  with great interest. And [...]

Frequently when we’re asked to assess someone’s manuscript, or help a writer brainstorm a story idea, we have to begin by stating a fundamental principle of fiction. It is, we say, a really bad [...]