Words: handle with care My book club this month is reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, and one particular section fascinated me. His character, Cal, says, “Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words … I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, ‘the happiness that attends disaster’. Or: […]

The present moves into the past, carrying us with it This week has seen the departure of two icons of my youth: Farrah Fawcett with her improbable hair, and Michael Jackson with his improbable life. They both shone out of television sets across a Britain struggling to compete with the shiny glamour of all things […]

What happens to you when you write? I’ll tell you what happens to me when I start to write a piece of long fiction (novel/novella/play) as long as you promise not to laugh (or at least, not to laugh where I can hear you). The first thing is I start to dream as if I […]