"I was discovering that the experience of reading is skewed when you know, or are about to know, the author. I needed an instrument, some measuring device, the narrative equivalent of movable compass points with which to gauge the distance between Haley and Edmund Alfredus. The author may have been k"
"I got up in the night to delete whole paragraphs and draw arrows and balloons across the pages."
"And I had other urgent concerns. Finals were only weeks away and I had a new boyfriend, a historian called Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type – lanky, large-nosed, with an outsized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an understated way, and extremely polite. I’d noticed quite a "
"Coming at the end of a day of typing and of trying to learn what constituted a file-worthy fact in the mind of the fearsome Miss Ling, Jowell’s earnest, haranguing delivery had a deadly, soporific effect on most of the intake. Everyone believed that to be caught out in a shameful moment when neck mu"
"IRD have worked with us and MI6 for years, cultivating writers, newspapers, publishers. George Orwell on his deathbed gave IRD a list of thirty-eight communist fellow-travellers. And IRD helped Animal Farm into eighteen languages and did a lot of good work for Nineteen EightyFour. And some marvellou"