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Articles & Extracts

Extract from The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1

Extract from The Wine Lover’s Daughter | Chapter 1

My father was a lousy driver and a two-finger typist, but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover. Nearly every evening of my childhood, I watched him cut the capsule – the foil sleeve that sheathes the bottle neck – with a sharp knife. Then he plunged the bore of a butterfly corkscrew into the exact center of the cork, twirled the handle, and, after the brass levers rose like two supplicant arms, pushed them down and gently twisted out the cork.
At England’s Edge

At England’s Edge

As A. E. Housman had it, ‘Clunton and Clunbury/ Clungunford and Clun/ Are the quietest places/ Under the sun.’ The villages are dotted along the valley of the River Clun, down in the south-west corner of Shropshire and nestled up against the border with Wales. Like many Midlanders, I find my weekends often turn westward, along the A5 through Shrewsbury and up into the hills that look across to Wales. Walking guides and maps will take you so far, but it was a joy to discover an overlooked little book which digs so much deeper into this country at the edge of England.
SF magazine subscribers only
‘Credendo Vides’

‘Credendo Vides’

Books should be officially declared an invasive species. They have been accumulating in our present home for forty years now, adding to those which had gathered over the previous forty. They tend to group themselves into sub-species; basically by subject or author, but without the pernickety precision of Dewey or the Library of Congress – they have their own priorities. For example, many years ago I inherited some little leather-bound volumes from my grandmother, and Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Arthur Conan Doyle still share a shelf as old friends. On the bookcase beside my bed is another self-selected settlement: an eclectic collection of books I pick up when I am tired and want to read a chapter or so before falling asleep, including Elizabeth Goudge, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. I wonder what they talk about among themselves?
SF magazine subscribers only
The Glory that Rome Wasn’t

The Glory that Rome Wasn’t

I once found a library that no one else ever seemed to visit. It was devoted to Scottish Literature and works of reference, unstaffed and on the first floor of a terraced house belonging to the University of Glasgow. I’d gone there initially to look up some words in a rare dictionary of medieval Scots and was so taken with the place that it became a favourite haunt. During my subsequent visits – long afternoons of essay writing, dozing and dreaming – I never encountered another soul.
SF magazine subscribers only
Always the Same River

Always the Same River

At my twenty-first birthday party, in a cheap north London pasta restaurant, a friend gave me a copy of Graham Swift’s Waterland, telling me that everyone who studied History should read it. Studying was perhaps a grand word for my efforts at university, but I was intrigued. My choice of subject meant I’d read very little fiction; I was busy reading historians who had initials instead of forenames – C. V. Wedgwood, E. H. Carr, A. J. P. Taylor and my patient tutor, H. R. Loyn – and had found time only to read a smattering of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. To be given a contemporary novel was thrilling.
SF magazine subscribers only
How the World Works

How the World Works

When I was a child, my father – who was a materials scientist, and used sometimes to make gunpowder in the back garden – told me that the study of physics was simply the study of how the world works. Optics and glass were his particular field. Occasionally he’d stand at the kitchen sink attempting to hand-grind a lens for a telescope or fetch a microscope and persuade my mother to supply a drop of blood for a slide. Observing the moon, or the bloody smear we could never quite resolve into cells, he’d be as fascinated by the means of procuring these images as by the images themselves and would try to teach me the principles of focal length.
SF magazine subscribers only
Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms

Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms

Over fourteen years as a journalist, I have written more than 2,000 articles. I’ve filed book reviews, exhibition reviews, columns, features, interviews and an investigation into bubble-wrap recycling. Nothing has generated so much interest, passion and sheer steaming outrage as the piece I wrote about my love of ironing. Letters were sent to the editor of The Times, friends emailed, friends’ mothers emailed, comments poured in online, social media went mad. The world divided into those who thought I was a tragic throwback chained to an ironing board and those who, like me, felt that when life’s problems seemed insurmountable, there was comfort in a stack of handkerchiefs ironed into perfect squares.
SF magazine subscribers only
Extract from Giving Up the Ghost | Part One: A Second Home

Extract from Giving Up the Ghost | Part One: A Second Home

It is a Saturday, late July, 2000; we are in Reepham, Norfolk, at Owl Cottage. There’s something we have to do today, but we are trying to postpone it. We need to go across the road to see Mr Ewing; we need to ask for a valuation, and see what they think of our chances of selling. Ewing’s are the local firm, and it was they who sold us the house, seven years ago. As the morning wears on we move around each other silently, avoiding conversation. The decision’s made. There’s no more to discuss.
‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum

‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum

I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent on the banks of the Tagliamento river in Venezia Giulia, I found the commanding officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers rising to his feet to greet me. Yet I was entering a man’s world, the world of war and soldiery. I felt like one of those unconvincing heroines of fiction who, disguised in buskins or Hussar’s jacket, penetrate the battlefields to find glory or romance: and the colonel’s civilized gesture of welcome, to an undistinguished and unpromising reporting subaltern, seemed to me a happy omen. So it was.

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