Biography

Any bookish person who has ever passed through an airport in the United States will tend to have been struck by a contrast. Airport bookshops in the UK are piled high with thrillers, spy stories, romantic comedies and how-to books: untaxing fare for a long flight.  Read more

Writing Tsarina and The Tsarina's Daughter allowed me to live a writer's dream: discovering hitherto unexploited, larger-than-life characters, who roam an equally unexplored setting. In his TED talk, the literary agent Jonny Geller says: "Readers are looking for a journey, from a place where they have not been, to a place they know not where..." It's the same for an author.

Last week news broke that Blake Bailey, the author of Philip Roth: The Biography, had been accused of sexual crimes and that his publisher, W. W. Norton, would halt promotion of the book. I had just reviewed it. Bailey's transmogrification didn't change my basic opinion of his work-not because it's that good, but because it's that bad.  Read more

I was going through my notebooks the other day when I came across a piece of paper; a torn scrap on which I'd written hurriedly a name and the plot number of a grave. Writing a family story is a question of finding where the bodies are buried and this, in very real terms, had been the first clue.  Read more

I first came across Philip Larkin's poems as a schoolboy in the late nineteen-sixties, when I began taking English "A" level and my teacher Peter Way asked our class to talk about Larkin's poems "Wires" and "At Grass." At the time, I had no great interest in poems, but I was interested in these two partly because (as a country boy) I thought that they both had a mistake in them.  Read more