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It’s not my phrase – fingertip history – but I love it. The historian and commentator on British social history, Juliet Gardener uses it when talking about fiction written immediately in the wake of historic events, the recounting of an age unclouded by nostalgia or hindsight. And in recent months, my reading diet has been...

That’s what Virginia Woolf considered necessary to become a writer of fiction. a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, Further on in the wonderfully sharp, observant, amusing and perceptive A Room of One’s Own, which grew out of a lecture that the author had been...

Most readers, when engrossed in a novel, probably give little attention to the narrative point of view. It’s one of those phrases – narrative perspective, narrative voice, point of view, that attention is drawn to on creative writing courses. The reader is obviously aware of a first person narrative as in Jane Eyre, for example,...

So at last my house move has begun to seem like a distant nightmare and I am happily – very happily – settled in somewhere that is now feeling very much like Home. And now that the decorators have finally departed leaving a splendidly refreshed and bright interior – I was beginning to feel as...

Christmas literary references are a bit like Christmas itself. The sources of Bah! Humbug! and Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents come swiftly to mind – but trying to be more original is hard. There’s C.S.Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, with the sad cry from poor Mr. Tumnus that: It is...

January might be, strictly speaking, in the accepted way of things, the first month of the new year with December the last of the old. But to me that is entirely inaccurate. September is the month that starts the whole ball rolling again just as June completes it. Which leaves July and August as delightfully...

One of the best things about writing novels is giving birth to numerous characters. These protagonists become surprisingly real over the course of developing and writing the story and there are times when the desire to meet them all in the flesh, invite them round for a cup of coffee or spot of supper becomes...