Vienna 2: Life (and death) beneath the surface
27/01/12 22:32
Vienna is a city of surface; one of the world’s most beautiful. But it has historically had a profound, and influential, fascination with what lies beneath those surfaces. The Third Man, with its subterranean pursuits, might be a metaphor for the city itself. But in one afternoon recently I visited two others...
Vienna in Advent
29/12/11 13:40
I spent a few idyllic -- good to be able to use the word precisely for once -- days in Vienna just before Christmas; now I’m trying to find a reason to set my next Laurence Bartram novel there rather than in Rome, my original plan. Such are the seductions of the writer’s trade... More on Vienna here.
John Emmett is one of WSJ's Top Ten of 2011
17/12/11 13:32
Very exciting to see that the Wall Street Journal has named The Return of Captain John Emmett as one of its Top Ten Mysteries of 2011. See the review here.
"Sunlight on the Garden" and the question of grief.
17/11/11 10:59
in my memoir Sunlight on the Garden, I wrote that we were, despite it all, a family of survivors. Nobody had ever killed themselves. A few weeks ago, that changed. It’s still terribly raw but I have written about it here.
Greece: the abyss gazes back.
19/09/11 11:22
You can see what the Greek finance minister is complaining about this morning. Greece has been a scapegoat for global systeic failures. It’s being reviled, bullied, harrassed and insulted by people who often seem to have no idea at all what the country is like, or its history, or its people. If it were a creditor harrassing and threatening an individual debtor like this, they’d be acting illegally and -- as has happened before -- the debt would be wiped out.
Oddly – actually, not that oddly when you consider its record in general – the British press has been the most shamefully bullying. in my little Greek island cottage now, and I have set out some thoughts here.
Oddly – actually, not that oddly when you consider its record in general – the British press has been the most shamefully bullying. in my little Greek island cottage now, and I have set out some thoughts here.
