‘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.
Refulgent mid-February sunshine makes the bar at the Chelsea Arts Club glow. Nine months on, that now seems another era, when William Boyd – in a smart jacket offset by an open shirt collar – was sitting, a glass of red wine to hand, soon after completing his sixteenth novel, Trio. That winter’s day, we were […]
Past masters: 100 of the best pictures by British photographers since the 1920s The writer William Boyd asks how, in an age of selfies, we are able to judge which images should endure William Boyd FEBRUARY 21 2020 Back in the summer of 1982, I was living and working in Oxford but spending a lot of […]
Three Doctors, A Dentist And A Nurse By William Boyd Back in 1971, during my first year at university (in Glasgow), aged 19, I began to suffer from debilitating headaches. They would come and go at random, while I was eating lunch, sitting in a lecture theatre, walking back to my hall of residence. They […]
By William Boyd March 16th was when we – I and my wife, Susan — decided to go into self-imposed lockdown, a full week ahead of this narrenschiff of a government. At first it seemed a daunting prospect. When our local restaurant closed its doors I remember the manager saying, “See you in three weeks”. […]
By Anton Chekhov Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Penguin Classics. 508 pp. £25.00 Reviewed by William Boyd In 1923, the English novelist William Gerhardie – then very much the young literary lion of the day – published a short monograph entitled Anton Chehov (Gerhardie’s spelling). It was a fascinating introduction to Chekhov’s work, […]
The author has written a new afterword that you can read here: “All history is the history of unintended consequences,” so the old saying goes, and the validity of the assumption is particularly well exemplified in the case of the fictional artist, Nat Tate (1928-1960). I deliberately didn’t use the possessive pronoun there – it […]