‘Does one desire the Yule-tide spirit, sir?’ ‘Certainly one does. I am all for it.’
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“Good God man,” he said. “You don’t mean to tell me you work in the afternoon?”
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Gerald Brenan wrote in 1956 at the end of his trip through the country in The Face of Spain that returning to London after Madrid offended his…
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Never pump yourself dry, advised Ernest Hemingway
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“I am a completely horizontal author.” Truman Capote
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If something’s worth writing, it’s almost certainly worth rewriting. One of the first lessons I learnt as a travel journalist in the 1990s was that if…
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“Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone.”
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A harmless minor pleasure or a chronic exercise in futility?
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My name is written inside, I’ve even added a couple of wincingly pompous notes on occasional pages. I must have read it. But I can’t recall a thing…
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A peek behind the velvet curtain at what I'm writing at the moment
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"If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings," advised Aldous Huxley, "the best thing you can do is to keep a pair of…
A lightly annotated list from Everyone is Still Alive to Winter Tales via Pont
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