Articles

 

In search of a sacred combe

The Irish Times, February 2018

For Thoreau it was Walden, for Yeats Innisfree, but many writers covet a creative space, be it a refuge in nature or a shed at the bottom of the garden

 

Top 10 deaths in fiction

The Guardian, October 2018

From Dickens to Woolf and Updike, novelists have taken on a dark but compelling challenge: to imagine their characters’ final experience

 

The creed of compromise

Aeon, January 2019

Work is a conundrum. We cannot measure the consequences of our choices against the alternatives that have passed us by. We can only try to be thoughtful and humble, empathise, observe others – sometimes a painful exercise – and speculate about what might have been. Here, then, is my speculation.

 

See one tiny figure, black against the speckled white and grey of a snow-filled valley, his steady progress between the roundish smokepuffs of trees the only movement, and his faint, crunching footsteps the only sound. Now see him close up, hands and sleeves tucked into the pockets of his long coat, trousers folded neatly into his socks above the heavy boots tied with double bows, head held high and vapour playing over his lips as he talks to himself in a low voice. What is he saying? He is saying these very words — he is me, practising the telling of my own story as I go along.