I am addicted to cookery books. I have a large number and like nothing better than to waste time looking at the splendid glossy photos and scanning the ingredients. Of course, most of the time, I never go on to cook the dish. Or if I do, I end up adapting that ingredients list, exchanging the prescribed herb or spice or sauce for whatever I happen already to have lurking at the back of my cupboard or fridge. Which is, with a bit of a stretch of the imagination (and after all, that’s what every writer has in abundance) a...

Fiction imitates life. That’s the idea, anyway. Fiction sets out to create situations, scenarios and settings with which we, as readers, can identify, relate or at least imagine. Yet in many ways, fiction is utterly unlike Real Life. Take the turning points the author has to create and inject into the story to propel the plot on its way. Those sudden realisations or revelations where the protagonist spontaneously becomes aware of something crucial or makes a life-changing decision. It’s part of the plotting and pacing of a novel – a moment at which the author has to take control and...

Except something within us which is always surprised by change. Not my words but those of Thomas Hardy. And I certainly agree with the sentiment. In fact, the sheer absurdity of how swiftly time goes – not just the days and weeks and months but the years. The decades. How is it possible, for example, that our children are no longer babes in arms, toddlers, tentative five year olds starting their first term at school? It is such a cliche to talk about how fleeting time is but its cliche status simply confirms its truth. Growing up, listening to parents...

Recently, I came across a post by a literary agency, claiming that the problem with too many fledgling novelists is that their novels are not sufficiently ‘page-turning.’ The article claimed that this was also the affliction of 19th century novelists who created too many diversions in their narratives. The contemporary reader, evidently, has no time for such saggy centres and wants only to progress at lightening speed onto the next page. Our attention span is very limited these days, it claimed, and any author worth his or her salt will appreciate this and move their fiction at a pace that...

There is a phrase which is often heard and frequently repeated that is used to describe people – people from the past who have made a particular impact or have striven and/or achieved something new. Something apparently unexpected. Original. Of course, they were ahead of their time. But it has struck me recently, hearing the phrase used on the radio a couple of weeks ago, how absurd and inappropriate it is. After all, we are all of our time. Whatever Our Time means. Either reflective of it or in retaliation. We are not ahead of it. The conversation that made...

Good literature, people agree, is long-lasting. It rides out fads and fashions so that years, decades, even centuries on, it still speaks truths to us. And I don’t just mean those huge universal themes to be found in Shakespeare – the perils of excessive ambition or jealousy or pride – the fatal flaws of the tragic hero. What I am talking about is the delight that can be felt when a character’s emotions strike such a familiar chord that you long to meet said protagonist for a coffee and chat over matters heart to heart. I have just finished reading...