In about 1997, I was sharing a bottle of wine with my good friend and neighbour Roger Deakin in the garden of Walnut Tree Farm, his house in the Waveney Valley. Although his life was going through a period of...
I was born into a family that loved horses. My father was an international show-jumper and amateur jockey. My mother was a brilliant horsewoman who had ridden all her life. My brother Philip and I hadn't been long in this...
Talking to the New York Times in 1936, Cole Porter took an unsentimental view of his work when it was completed. 'The moment the curtain rises on the opening night, I say to myself: “There she goes” and I’ve bid...
Today's the birthday of Bob Dylan. Here's a piece I wrote in 2005 when Dylan was nominated (unsuccessfully - again) for the Nobel Prize: It was an odd kind of funeral. The deceased had lived a full and somewhat rackety...
Every now and then, perhaps once or twice a month, a new cause for concern is discovered. From some distant campus, a research paper is published which reveals that something we had previously taken for granted is, in fact, deeply...
It was April 1998. I was living in a flat in London after my marriage had gone belly-up. I had been working on my novel Kill Your Darlings and was so stuck that it felt as if it was killing me....
I am feeling a little bit jilted. An important relationship has recently come to an end. Already I find I am missing the old familiar things we did - our meetings once or twice a week, our plans, our outings,...
It is the time of the year when, in homes across the country, moods will be on the turn. The cards, decorations and little lights which, a matter of hours ago, conveyed seasonal jolliness now represent yet another dreary housekeeping...
Beyond the daily grind of the thousand words, there is a rhythm to life as a writer. The commission of the moment (if there is one), the pressure of the work in progress, the seductive possibilities of those what-if, why-not?,...
The thousands of brave, rash souls around the world who have been participating in National Novel Writing Month will have typed their last word by midnight on Monday. According to the rules of the competition, they should have completed a...