Blog

1968 – The Year The Sixties Exploded

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 conversation with William Boyd

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 […]

The Hyman Collection

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 […]

Dear NHS

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 […]

Lockdown 2020

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”. […]

52 Stories

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, […]

Literature’s Bloody Thames

By William Boyd I live about 200 yards from the Thames at Chelsea and walk by the river most days and, most days, cross it twice. It’s impossible for me to think of London unshaped by this great river, its ever-changing aspect and the way it entirelyaffects my consideration of the place where I live. […]

1 2 3 8