An Author's Notebook

Today I'm sitting at my computer in three jumpers, looking through the window at snowflakes swirling around the garden. As ever, I'...

An intriguing nugget I've learnt from my two weeks of #litfest indulgence? The novelist Ann Patchett slipped into her favourite ballgow...

At long last, spring is in the air! I can't say I feel the urge to spring-clean, but all this lovely sunshine is raising my energy level...

What secrets does our house keep? Credit: William Lam Archaeologists recently found a fragment of Roman pottery in my home town, in the...

Travel diary WWI sites in Belgium and France Every evening in the Belgian town of Ypres, people of all nationalities gather at the Menin ...

Notes from the Henley Literary Festival 2017 My son meets children's author Katherine Rundell, who researched her latest novel Th...

A visitor to the Skybar, Grand Hotel Central So I have a friend who is currently sailing around the world in a yacht with her husband an...

People watching: Greg Rook, Artist and Course Director, Fine Art, London South Bank University Hours before Paris suffered a series of de...

This is my short story that was shortlisted in the Henley Literary Festival 2015 short-story competition . A few of you have asked me to pos...

Notes from the Henley Literary Festival 2015 My favourite event in Henley's social carousel has come round again. For one glorious wee...

My daughter found something out about herself this week. After taking a narrator role in her school play, she discovered she rather enjoyed ...

A few months ago I had the pleasure of shepherding a group of excitable seven-year olds around the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The highligh...

Hermaphrodite Mum Three kids and a single mum Middle Child came back from school a while ago and told me he had some important n...

Dame Stella: MI5's first female head Credit: James Gifford-Mead We had a marvellous day out last Saturday: we went en famille to an...