Susan Hill

The pure joy of grandchildren

27 January 2024 9:00 am

Author's notebook

18 January 2023 10:00 pm

RIP Fay Weldon, a force of nature

6 January 2023 1:29 am

Novelists can often be disappointingly unremarkable as people but occasionally one, like Fay Weldon, is a force of nature. She…

Why do patients need to know they’re dying? 

19 November 2022 9:00 am

Why do patients need to know they’re dying?

The truth about ‘the most haunted house in England’

8 October 2022 9:00 am

Place and story are little remembered now. The rectory in Essex was severely damaged by fire in 1939. But any…

Home remedies are good for us – and the NHS

16 July 2022 9:00 am

Home remedies are good for us — and the NHS

The day I found a postcard from Virginia Woolf

11 June 2022 9:00 am

A dispiriting week. Three months ago, skips arrived, into which were cast the detritus of a decade. Charity shops were…

My love affair with the Wolseley

9 April 2022 9:00 am

I was sitting alone at a small table in the Wolseley, Piccadilly, waiting for my supper and feeling a sense…

Can I really be turning 80?

5 February 2022 9:00 am

A princess of Hanover wrote in her diary: ‘My 30th birthday. There must be some mistake.’ Substitute 30th for 80th…

My post-viral battle and what it tells us about long Covid

28 August 2021 9:00 am

My post-viral battle

The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past

19 December 2020 9:00 am

Seances, trikes and the miracle of tinfoil

East Anglia is the place for birds

10 October 2020 9:00 am

I first visited Orford in 1970, at peak Cold War when this stretch of the East Anglian coast was one…

We all love a poltergeist story

3 October 2020 9:00 am

There are fashions in the paranormal as in everything else. Since the famous Enfield hauntings of the late 1970s, poltergeists…

The dying need real conversation, not false cheeriness

13 June 2020 9:00 am

A nurse friend recently finished six weeks in a Covid intensive care unit where she witnessed many deaths and always…

There’s no point in bishops – Covid has shown us so

6 June 2020 9:00 am

It is a relief to parents that young children are allowed out a bit now as the length of the…

The genius of Alfred Hitchcock

30 May 2020 9:00 am

Nobody earns the right to respect just by having lived into old age, whenever that begins — it has happened…

The lost world of lockdown

23 May 2020 9:00 am

It started when, the day after the announcement of some lockdown easing, I drove five miles along the coast road.…

Who can still make a Sunday joint last a week?

16 May 2020 9:00 am

Sunday lunch was always roast beef and, in the traditional way, the Yorkshire pudding was served first with gravy, supposedly…

In the Covid era, age isn’t just a number

9 May 2020 9:00 am

When I told my seven-year-old granddaughter, over Zoom, how much I missed being with her, I added: ‘Maybe it won’t…

Do we really want to go back to normal?

2 May 2020 9:00 am

On the day our A-level exams began some wit wrote on the blackboard: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time…

Pity the poor stepmother — the most reviled character in folk literature

25 April 2020 9:00 am

Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but…

Now is the time for comfort reads

24 April 2020 11:00 pm

It all started on the day after the Brexit referendum. People who do not get the result they voted for…

The joy of short stories in these taxing times

18 April 2020 9:00 am

From time to time, usually when things are quiet, the government brings on the dancing girls. David Cameron made Carol…