Reviewed in the New York Times 25 February 2007By William Boyd What is it about African wars that is so disturbing? Why do they unsettle us so? We in the civilised West know all about bestial and mindless cruelty, as the events of 1939-45 so graphically prove. And yet as we read about Darfur and Mogadishu today […]
W&N 488pp 25 pounds Review by William Boyd In the winter and spring of 1980/81 I was living in Oxford busy writing and researching my second novel, An Ice-Cream War, which had as its setting the First World War in East Africa, more precisely the long inter-colonial conflict between the British East Africa (today’s Kenya) and […]
573 pp. Free Press $32.50 Review by William Boyd William Boyd’s latest novel Ordinary Thunderstorms (Harper) was published earlier this year. In 1967, some thirteen years after the publication of The Lord of the Flies, William Golding confessed to a friend (p 320) that he resented his first novel because it meant that he owed his reputation to […]
John Murray, 614 pp, £25.00 Review by William Boyd I still possess my 1967 Penguin paperback of Somerset Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook. Ostensibly a distillation of his diary, kept over some 50 years, it was more interesting to the aspiring novelist for the gnomic advice Maugham offered on the craft of writing. ‘There’s no need for […]
By William Boyd A – Angus Wilson (1913-1991), novelist and short story writer, identified what he called an essential dichotomy in the English realistic novel dating back to Samuel Richardson in the 18th century, namely the concepts of ‘town’ and ‘country’ and the opposing values centred around them. The division is an intriguing one, even today, […]
By William Boyd When I was preparing to shoot my World War I film The Trench (1999) I deliberately set myself two serious challenges. However the film turned out – good, bad or indifferent — I wanted to be able to put my hand on my heart and to say, first, that it was as factually accurate […]
By William Boyd Howard Hawkes defined a successful film in this way: ‘Three good scenes. No bad scenes‘. If only it were that easy, you think. Your name is Alan Smithee1 and you want to be a film director. ‘Film director’ is a catch-all phrase and many sub-groups are contained within it. They include those […]
by William Boyd A couple of years ago I was approached by the producer Hilary Bevan Jones and asked to write a short, silent film. It was only to be ‘silent’ in the sense that dialogue was banned – music, sound effects and so forth were all permitted. The challenge was irresistible and I wrote […]
Introduction by William Boyd Photography has been called the ‘artless art’ — the somewhat facile implication behind the adjective being that anyone with a camera is capable, by hazard, of producing a great or striking photograph. A combination of chance, circumstance, the camera and its capacities (increasingly sophisticated in this digital age) coheres in the […]
By William Boyd In 1969, when I was seventeen and sitting my Art ‘A’ level (I had dreams of becoming a painter, then), my constant book of reference was A Dictionary of Modern Painting, published by Methuen. This was a highly eclectic and scholarly A-to-Z (from Apollinaire to Zandomeneghi) some 400 pages long with contributions from […]