Articles & Extracts

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.
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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.
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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.
‘The plumage is a wonder to behold . . . ’| Extract from Ghosting

‘The plumage is a wonder to behold . . . ’| Extract from Ghosting

So strange and exotic is he that he could be a rare tropical bird that you might never come face to face with, even in a lifetime spent in the rain forest. The plumage is a wonder to behold: a large sapphire in the lapel of a bold striped suit, a vivid silk tie so bright that it dazzles, and when he flaps his wings the lining of his jacket glints and glistens like a prism. He sees that I am startled and he smiles. He takes my hand in his and lays it on the silk lining. You want to touch? Go on, touch! It’s best Chinese silk. I have only the best.
One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

The yew tree appeared as wafers of snow to our waking eyes, when March dawned. The rest of it was lost in darkness. The prospect of March is usually (as Johnson said of a friend’s second marriage) ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. A visitor brought us some daffodils that had been raised under glass: ‘daffodils that take the winds of March with beauty’. Although these had never felt a breath of wind, they seemed to create a magic breeze about them, by their petals flung back from their jag-edged trumpets. Their perfume filled the room with spring, after our winter of scentless maidenhair and helichrysum.
Dorothy: The Highlights

Dorothy: The Highlights

It’s always risky to buy a second-hand book online, especially when the condition is described as ‘fair’, which embraces a wide variety of possible faults. When Dorothy Wordsworth’s Continental Journals, 1798–1820 (1897) arrived, a quick flick through revealed that the text on many pages had been made hideous by vivid green highlighting. This was annoying but not sufficiently so to make me return the book. In fact I’ve found that annotations can sometimes add to one’s enjoyment, as in the case of a copy of George Borrow’s Lavengro, chosen from the library of an old friend who had recently died. Reading the pencilled annotations in his familiar hand, it was as if I was reading it alongside him, enjoying again his questioning mind and gentle intelligence, bringing him back to life for me for a few hours.
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How to Marry an Earl

How to Marry an Earl

As a little girl I used to hate flying because it hurt my ears. And when I say hurt, I mean it felt as if someone was trying to drill right through them. This was unfortunate, since we regularly flew to Germany to visit family every Christmas, and often over Easter or the summer too. Of course I tried all the usual remedies – chewing gum; sucking mints; swallowing then yawning; yawning then swallowing. But as with most aches and pains, nothing worked half as well as a good book. And the book I remember working best was Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess below Stairs (1981, later reissued as The Secret Countess).
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Joie de Vivre

Joie de Vivre

Idle speculation, of course, but occasionally I’ve fantasized that the great historian Richard Cobb and I chanced to be sitting together on a tram in Toulouse in 1946, when I was 4 and he was in his late twenties and just about to be demobbed. He’d have been on his way to visit a young woman he’d met at the British Fortnight organized in the city by the British Council. I’d have been riding the tram for the thrill of it, in the care of its conductress, who was a lodger in my maternal grandparents’ boarding-house behind Place du Capitole, as were my mother, sister, newly born brother and I, dispatched from England for a few months while my father, no longer able to support us properly, looked for a permanent teaching post.
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The Noblest Profession

The Noblest Profession

Helen McGill has a problem. A self-described ageing spinster – she is, good heavens, approaching forty – Helen is feeling unappreciated by the Sage of Redfield, her brother Andrew, whose books about life on the farm and the virtues of pastoral living have made him a literary celebrity – and to Helen’s thinking, very much at her expense. For it is Helen who bakes the bread and collects the eggs and cooks the meals on her wood-fired stove and cleans the house and darns the socks so that the Sage may amble down country roads and come home to lean on his fence, light his pipe and think big thoughts. Then, having handed his sister his dirty laundry, the Sage will retire to his study, warm and well-fed, to spin yarns about his adventures in ‘the bosom of Nature’ and reflect on the Simple Life. When Roger Mifflin, a caravan-driving itinerant bookseller, appears at her door hoping to meet the great man, who yet again has wandered off on ‘some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book’ and left Helen to run the farm, Helen decides she has had enough.
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Best of British

Best of British

Most books are confined to the straitjacket of their own generation, shackled and bonded to those who first bought them, read them, loved them and spread the word. It is a rare book that transcends its own time: a four-leaf clover, a repentant politician, a virgin queen. But I like to think that P. R. Reid’s three books on the Colditz prisoner-of-war camp, devoured by those of us who rejoice in being baby-boomers, will still be read by future generations.
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Laying It on with a Trowel

Laying It on with a Trowel

In the early 1920s Axel Munthe, the renowned physician born in Sweden in 1857, was going blind. Shrinking from the glare of the sun he retired to a dark tower and taught himself to use a typewriter. Henry James had suggested he write a memoir – it might cheer him up. Munthe was surprised when The Story of San Michele (1929) became an international bestseller and rightly predicted that in a hundred years’ time nobody would have heard of it. This neglected but altogether thrilling life story was a gift from an Argentine friend of mine, her favourite book, she said. ‘When people ask “Who is Axel Munthe?” I reply with a slight air of reproach, “Well, they’ve heard of him in Buenos Aires . . .”’
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