Category: General Blog

It’s hard to escape the current enthusiasm for reading – and quite right too! 2026 has been declared the National Year of Reading. The idea is to encourage people to discover – or re-discover – a love for reading and find a place for it in our lives. Evidently, there is a considerable decline in...

Yes, today is Jane Austen’s birthday! Born on 16th December 1775, countless admirers of her novels and numerous Janeite societies across the world are marking the day with enthusiasm and reverence – and no doubt there’s been an increase in her online sales as her name is brought to the forefront of people’s minds just...

The familiar words – The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – open L.P. Hartley’s wonderful novel, The Go-Between. Published in 1953, the protagonist, Leo Colston, chances upon his diary written over the summer of 1900 and the unfolding story, reflecting back upon those pivotal months and reawakening suppressed memories, allows...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

With all my precious books now packed away ready to be transported to their new home – only a few hundred yards or so from their current one – my thoughts are decidedly switching to where and how they will be displayed on shelves yet to be constructed. And for some of them, in a...