Stars in his eyes

Novels, for me, have come from somewhere I wasn’t looking. In my twenties I was carrying an idea about a woman wandering around Ireland on a quest she didn’t understand and I sat in the Reading Room o

The sixtieth anniversary ‘heritage’ edition of Ariel

Search for “bog” in this new edition of Seamus Heaney’s poems and you will find the word some 60 times; the 1,200 tissue-thin pages are mulchy with “the squelch and slap of soggy peat”. There is the o

The wisdom of Bertie Wooster

We have wandered many months through this land of Building Blocks. It is time for a break. Learning is a weary trek. And writing is not all about learning. Writing is about, well, writing. The doing o

The lyric essay is a relatively new form of creative non-fiction, and it’s often considered the most challenging to write because it is hard to describe and define. In fact, the key is blurring bounda