Interviews

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 […]

A Life In Books

5 books that are most important to me.The Collected Stories of Anton ChekhovThe greatest short story writer the world has ever seen.  Stories, well over a hundred years old now, that read as if they were written for 2007: dry, absurd, resolutely secular — the most honest clear-eyed look at the strange tragi-comedy of our […]

The Poet’s Sleep

I am lucky enough to be a sound sleeper, in the main, though, like everyone, when my brain is racing I have my ‘nuits blanches’ from time to time. However, my sound sleep is not uninterrupted.  Two things wake me in the night: recurring dreams and what I can only describe as ‘London’. I have […]

Reading Group Q & A with William Boyd

1. How did the idea of writing Ordinary Thunderstorms come to mind and was there any particular challenge involved? It’s a complicated answer.  First of all I had the large and vague ambition of writing a novel about London, contemporary London, a city I’ve lived in now for over a quarter of a century.  But how to […]

Le Point interview with William Boyd.

The French Academy has just launched a website to warn against the most frequent and « ridiculous » errors in the use of the French language. What do you think of such an initiative? Do you think languages should be protected from impoverishering or evolving? It’s very difficult to protect languages. You can issue all […]

1 2