Read the full article on the Daily Mail website • Ant McPartlin has made planning application to extend garage at London home • Changed his name in documents set to Merton Council to Logan Mountstuart • Name is used by fictitious British writer in 2002 novel Any Human Heart by William Boyd
Awarded in early June, the Fitzgerald Prize rewards a novel in French or translated from English reflecting the elegance, the spirit, the flavour and the art of living of the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Award-winning novelist and screenwriter William Boyd talks about his writing process, his film and television experiences from Chaplin to Cork, chimpanzees, what makes his favourite films and what he had for breakfast.
By William Boyd I first became aware of the strange and beguiling world of Muriel Spark on the release, in 1968, of the film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Like most successful films, the adaptation took me back to the original, hungry for a richer aesthetic experience. I was not disappointed and since […]
By Norman Mailer Random House 477 pp $26.95 Reviewed by William Boyd The prospect of this novel was highly enticing and alluring: Norman Mailer on Adolf Hitler and his family. Mailer, who has tackled – fearlessly, full-throatedly — Marilyn Monroe, Jesus Christ, Lee Harvey Oswald, Picasso, Mohammed Ali and Gary Gilmore (amongst others) seemed to […]
Like Vladimir Nabokov, I think the word ‘genius’ should be used incredibly sparingly and not be casually bandied about. In certain fields of human endeavour the appellation seems relatively easy to understand and identify – I’m thinking of science, philosophy, mathematics and music, in particular. We appear able to recognise genius in composers almost instinctively. […]
By William Boyd Let us begin at a notional beginning. I have an image in my head of a band of Neanderthals (or some similar troupe of humanoids) hunkered round the fire at the cave-mouth as the night is drawing in and one of them says, spontaneously: ‘You’ll never believe what happened to me today.’ […]
I want to begin with two quotations that will go some way to revealing my own position on matters of faith. ‘The Andaman islanders believe in a class of supernatural beings which are denoted by the term ‘spirits’… The spirits of the forest and the sea are believed to be generally invisible… [and] are believed […]
Readers develop unique histories with the books they read. It may not be immediately apparent at the time of reading but the person you were when you read the book, the place you were where you read the book, your state of mind while you read it, your personal situation (happy, frustrated, depressed, bored) and […]
Foreword by William Boyd “O homem nâo é um animalÉ uma carne inteligenteEmbora às vezes doente.” [Man is not an animalIs intelligent fleshAlthough sometimes ill.] Something of the baffling, beguiling, disturbing appeal of Fernando Pessoa is contained in these three lines of poetry taken from a short poem he wrote in 1935, the year of […]