Well it isn’t quite as bad as all that, indeed you could argue that it was entirely a work-related escapade, or at least that it was for research purposes. In short, I went (accompanied by the ever-patient Husband) to visit Strawberry Hill House: Horace Walpole’s extraordinary eighteenth-century creation that is not only the first gothic […]

Well, you learn something new every day. I learned a few days ago that this last week was National Storytelling Week: thank you Twitter. Philip Pullman once said that every teacher ought to be able to tell a story, just to keep the class quiet for the last fifteen minutes on a Friday afternoon. From […]

My father used to say that his sister (aged about 10) saw the film of Dracula in 1931 and was never the same again. Bela Lugosi is surely the iconic Dracula: clad in cape and evening dress, intoning the heavily accented, ‘I never drink …. vine’. I was nearly 30 when I sat down to […]

Anyone who reads ( and, I suspect, quite a few who don’t habitually read) has The List at the back of their mind, I say the back because the more confirmed the bibliophile the more subconscious the list will become. These are the novels that changed the way you thought; you don’t think about them […]

In reading (and perhaps in life) I am a chaser of rabbits: I miss the blasted obvious and go careening off after the details: a sort of literary laborador. If I had been Lewis Carroll’s Alice, I would have gone headlong after that albino bunny as well, I’d want to know what kind of watch […]