John le Carré’s fiction could be simultaneously old-fashioned and thoroughly modern, but what made it Le Carré-esque? The sudden and unexpected death of John Le Carré last month inevitably prompts an evaluation of the both the work and the man. There are more than two dozen novels, the most recent of which, Agent Running in […]
2020 catapulted the world into ‘interesting times’ and we’ve been through the five stages of grief — but in reverse, says William Boyd May you live in interesting times,” so the disarming old Chinese curse goes. Of course “interesting” in this sense is a loaded word full of threatening, unsettling nuances like anarchic, turbulent, disastrous, […]
Welcome to Insurance Covered! The podcast that looks at the inner workings of the insurance industry with the help of expert guests. We are joined by Novelist and Director William Boyd and we will be discussing insurance in popular culture, more specifically through Armadillo, a novel William published in 1998 where the main protagonist is […]
Set on a Brighton film set in 1968, this showbiz story is intricate and funny – but should William Boyd be taking more risks? Trio is William Boyd’s 16th novel – and that’s before we get on to the dozen or so screenplays for film and television. How does someone produce so much work? I […]
What a pleasure it is to read a novel by an author who not only knows what he is doing and how to bring it off, but also remembers that people mostly read novels for enjoyment. Trio is a comic novel, even Puckish – “Lord, what fools these mortals be”; yet one which recognizes that […]
Trio is about double lives. Three characters are central to it: Talbot Kydd, a middle-aged film producer; Elfrida Wing, a novelist with writer’s block; and Anny Viklund, a glamorous young actress. What brings them together is the making of a film in Brighton in high summer 1968. The late 1960s have been enjoying something of […]
‘The secret lives of three characters on a 1960s film set make for the novelist’s funniest book in years’ WH Auden said of TS Eliot that three different figures coexisted within him: a conscientious churchwarden, a screaming peasant woman and a mischievous 12-year-old boy. Much the same is true of William Boyd, whose novels have […]
By William Boyd for the New Statesman. I was seventeen when 1969 became 1970 so, logically and irrefutably, I had lived through the so-called Swinging Sixties. I do remember going to a discotheque in London when I was sixteen, called Samantha’s, I think, and dancing around a white e-type Jaguar in the middle of the […]
By William Boyd for the Guardian. In the summer of 1968 I was sixteen years old and, in retrospect, those months appear significant for me only because I had sat my “O” level examinations, all eleven of them, and was waiting apprehensively for the results. Consequently, the rest of the summer of ’68 remains something […]
A live interview with William Boyd, by Tamsin Greig, talking about his 16th novel Trio.