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 […]
By William Boyd In London, in June this year, Sotheby’s sold a 1914 Egon Schiele townscape — Häuser mit bunter Wäsche (Vorstadt II) – for €27,635,665. It was a world record for the artist and was bought by an anonymous bidder over the telephone. One would like to think this bidder was acting for one of London’s […]
William Boyd, 54, was born in Ghana, where his mother was a teacher and his father a doctor. He was a junior don at Oxford and working as a journalist when his first novel, A Good Man In Africa, was published in 1981. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award. He is the author of […]
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 […]
After writing 17 novels, numerous screenplays and countless reviews and essays, do you feel as inspired now as you did say 20 or 30 years ago? Yes, I do actually. Funnily enough I feel in the last three of four years a new surge of energy. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m getting older, […]