This exhilarating and tender novel set in the summer of 1968 asks: what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn’t? Pre-order your signed copy via Waterstones now at bit.ly/GetSignedTrio
When Richard Sorge – reputedly the greatest spy who ever lived – was executed by the Japanese on 7 November 1944 his last words were: “The Red Army!”, “The International Communist Party!” and “The Soviet Communist Party!”, all delivered in fluent Japanese to his captors. Sorge was bound hand and foot, the noose already set […]
I’M ON A FLYING VISIT to Prague. I have been to Prague before, but over twenty years ago, and I’d forgotten how beautiful and unspoilt the place is. And, of course, it being Prague, my thoughts turn almost instantly to Franz Kafka. This powerful association between city and writer is reinforced when I open the […]
She had heard the news in the post office. Two women were talking and she picked up one of them saying something like, ‘— Yes, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, right here, can you believe it?’ She listened some more but they started gossiping about church matters so she had to interrupt. Excuse me. Did […]
I own a 1965 Baedeker guide to Berlin. Like all Baedekers it’s superbly detailed, a model of pragmatic advice and scrupulous information. It’s also a historical artefact as it was published just four years after the Berlin Wall went up. Here, in precise, neutral commentary, is all you need to know – as a tourist […]
John Buchan (1875-1940) is a member of a very small club: namely that club of serious novelists and poets who had a genuine career as politicians or diplomats (this is not the same as politicians or diplomats who have turned their hand to the odd novel or two). One thinks in this context of WB […]
I am in Antibes and I’m a bit lost as the GPS on my phone keeps packing up. Furthermore, there is something of a fracas on the street I’m heading down. A red pompier truck has parked itself squarely in the roadway, blue lights flashing, traffic is backed up and people are stepping out of […]
I AM IN VIENNA. Or, rather, I should be in Vienna. Put it this way, I would like to be in Vienna, right now, on the Austrian leg of a mini book tour – Salzburg, Vienna, Zurich, Munich – for the reissue in Germany of my novel Die blaue Stunde (The Blue Afternoon). But force […]
If poetry was the literary form of the First World War, it was fiction that best expressed the reality of the Second. My next-door neighbour for many years, Colonel Peter Peyman, was a veteran of Dunkirk. As a young subaltern he’d fought in the rearguard and had been lucky to be evacuated. After his death […]
A Schoolmaster’s War: Harry Rée, British Agent in the French Resistance Edited by Jonathan Rée As one drives around the back roads of rural south-west France, where I live for part of the year, it’s quite common to come across a small, well-maintained obelisk on the verge. These modest memorials – usually inscribed with a […]