print & publish, readers & reading
Virginia Woolf’s comment on second hand books is for all those of you who love the look and feel of them, the randomness and surprise of finding them in old boxes, or lined up in a charming bookshop. I hope that, like me, you also enjoy second guessing the...
podcasts, readers & reading, review
Listening time: 8 minutes.Enjoy this celebration of a favourite book by a favourite author about a favourite poet. Nicolson’s homage to Homer is a highly original take on the Iliad and the Odyssey, also providing fresh insights into the nature and continuing...
podcasts, readers & reading
Listening time: 13 minutes. One of my top two children’s books of all time, I first read Elizabeth Goudge’s Little White Horse as a grown up. That didn’t prevent my being enchanted and strengthened by it. Thinking which of the WritingRedux book...
places & spaces, readers & reading
I fell in love with this room when I saw this sunlit painting. The Victorian artist has captured a perfect cosy, bright spot for reading, in a magnificent yet intimate Elizabethan or Jacobean interior. I wonder what titles are in that pile of books on the table. ...
readers & reading, writing & writers
Today is Shakespeare’s birthday & ours! The WritingRedux literary ink-fest is 4 years old with 2000+ dazzling illustrated quotes, reviews and other bright writing delights. Sign up for regular mind-feast despatches to hone your wits and lift your...
podcasts, readers & reading
Listening time: 15 minutes. It’s about a quarter of a century since I first read this moving and enlightening book. Having recently re-read it, I was struck by how acutely relevant it remains to some of the central dilemmas we face. At one level, it is a beautifully...
podcasts, readers & reading
Listening time: 12 minutes. This is a biography of an artist written by a poet. It’s also a meditation on creativity in life and art. Mary Granville Pendarves Delany began life with the eighteenth century which she nearly spanned (1700-1788). She may also have...
print & publish, readers & reading
Steinbeck and Robert Capa spent a month in the Soviet Union. It took some time for Steinbeck to cotton on to the fact that his travelling companion was a closet biblioklept. I love the blithe insistence of innocence in Capa, even when caught book-handed, with that...
podcasts, readers & reading
Listening time: 19 minutes. Having inherited, at the age of 21, the Shiants, three small islands east of the Outer Hebrides, Nicolson wrote Sea Room as ‘a love letter to them’ before handing them over to his son. He describes them as ‘the most powerful absence I...
print & publish, readers & reading
An idea so intrinsic to reading books, particularly those you love and remember, that I had never consciously thought of it. Here, Michael Rosen describes his first encounter with a children’s classic, and it made me recall early encounters with some beloved...
