Books
Dear Mary: Help me hunt down my priceless missing book
Q. A scholarly book of great importance to me appears to have gone missing from my library. It was heavily…
L.P. Hartley’s guide to coping with a heatwave
Those of us who have been struggling to endure the recent heat should turn to L.P. Hartley’s classic coming-of-age novel The…
Why I’m now scared of book clubs
Writing frankly about Jamaica has made me nervous of invitations from strangers. How would this one turn out?
Kindles will kill off the bookish loner (thank God)
Kindle highlights turn the lonely pleasures of reading into a communal event
If Alex Salmond is cutting bureaucracy, why does he have so many quangos?
Escape committees An LSE/Institute for Government report estimated the cost of Scottish independence at £2.7 billion, a sum arrived at…
Dear Mary: How can I make my polite English husband interrupt like a German?
Q. My dear English husband has never mastered the knack of timing his interventions in conversation. He hesitates politely, and…
Some consumer advice: do not sell your daughter for a bottle of 90-year-old port
Port, or Hermitage? This does not refer to personal consumption. I was trying to remember Meredith’s Egoist, in which one…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that inheritance tax ‘shouldn’t be paid by people who’ve worked hard and saved…
Jeffrey Archer’s diary: My personal trainer only smiles when I’m in pain
The week leading up to publication is a strange time for any author. You subject yourself to doing everything from…
Is any kind of sex still taboo in literature?
Is there any kind of love that novelists still can’t touch?
Alexander McCall Smith’s diary: Meeting Babar’s creator
As any author will tell you, literary festivals differ widely. If you are invited to Willy Dalrymple’s Jaipur Festival, with…
Dear Mary: How can I make my friends read the book I gave them?
Q. I gave a copy of Dan Russel the Fox by Somerville and Ross to a couple I know to be…
How the MPs' expenses scandal proved the wisdom of Alain de Botton
Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be nicer so that fewer people hate me, I remember my old friend Alain…
By the book: The NSA is behaving like a villain in a 1950s novel
The continuing drip-feed of stories about governments and friendly-seeming internet giants sifting through our data has left some citizens feeling…
Martin Vander Weyer: How many times must we save the City?
Top of my Christmas reading pile is Saving the City by Richard Roberts, a new account of the largely forgotten…
Damian McBride: Why I clutched at my trousers in front of Jeremy Paxman
They say nothing beats the feeling of seeing your book in print. But for me, the proudest moment was presenting…
Seamus Heaney's poems are for Protestants too
Seamus Heaney’s poetry from the other side of Northern Ireland’s divide
The views that inspire writers
Do writers really need inspiring landscapes? Or the opposite?
What a tortoise can teach us
Five lessons from my new pet
It’s the summer of the topless man – and there’s nothing we can do to stop it
Topless men. What does that mean, then? I was opposite one on the tube the other day, heading north from…
The greatest novel in English – and how to drink it
Which is the greatest novel in the English language? Let us review the candidates: Clarissa, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, The…
Dear Mary: How can I stop friends from coming to my book launch?
Q. I have far too many friends to be able to invite them all to my forthcoming book launch. How…
