Author: alan

Street-haunting in Tokyo

I AM IN JAPAN, in Tokyo to be precise: looking out of my hotel bedroom window, from the thirty-sixth floor of a huge tower, at this vast modern city stretching out to the horizon and beyond. I’ve been to Tokyo before but, up high, this near-bird’s-eye view is destabilizing and denaturing. Not that there’s much […]

Past Masters

A recent donation to Oxford’s Bodleian Library showcases 100 of the best pictures by British photographers in the 20th and 21st centuries. The writer William Boyd asks how, in an age of selfies, we we are able to judge which images should endure. Back in the summer of 1982, I was living and working in […]

5 Minute Philosopher is a weekly series in which Stylist gets profound with people we love. What will TV presenters Ant & Dec make of our existential questions?

Read the full article on the Stylist website Q: What book do you recommend most to others? Ant: William Boyd, Any Human Heart. It’s a wonderful story of a man’s life; the ups, the downs, the loves, the losses. Dec: The Boy, The Mole, The Fox And The Horse by Charlie Mackesy. It’s a beautiful book of philosophy. Get […]

Ant McPartlin masks his identity in planning application with the name of a boozy love cheat from his favourite novel as telly host looks to extend his garage at south-west London mansion

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

Muriel Spark’s The Girls Of Slender Means

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 […]

The Castle In The Forest

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 […]

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