In the days before google maps provided answers (of a sort) to all essential pre-travel questions - how long? how far? how much? what w...

In 1976, I came out.  When I revealed this to my children many years later they were extremely surprised, and really rather disappointed whe...

So, here I am, sitting with my novel after a first meeting with my new editor.  There are revisions to make and things to think about.  I am...

After the recent conclave, a commentator said of Cardinal Bergoglio, the new pope, 'he's chosen the name Francis, the gentle saint...

Writers are often asked how we feel when we've finished writing a book.  Is there a sense of relief?  Are we sad?  Do we actually type ...

The Burns Supper season is upon us, that moment in dreary January when Scots all over the world dust down their Scottishness, their bagpip...

I'm now so hooked on audio books that those two little earphony white snails dangle permanently down my front.   This is a boon and a cu...

Every All Souls Day, my family gathers together and prays for all the dead relations.  We're Catholic, so that's a lot of relations....

Social networking is here to stay.  Yet neither blogs nor tweets can take the place of the old-fashioned commonplace book on whose pages the...

Martin Amis has said that if September 11 2001 had to happen, he was not sorry it happened in his lifetime.   I'm sure I needn't pr...

After GB’s Olympic triumph, I was going to write about dressage this month, a sport which commentators insist is mysterious and faintly pe...

One sentence in a work in progress can take hours of research.  My sentence reads: 'The executed don't pay for rope, more's the ...

My current brush with Bach’s Goldberg Variations has led me deep into the world of hammers, pins, dampers, levers, jacks, strings, regu...

Please forgive a little personal history, but our theme is ghosts, and our ghosts usually appear when we put up our decorations. Only toda...

I'm highly indebted to Eve Edwards for including in the list of accepted but erroneous beliefs (3rd November), that ‘Napoleon was short’...

Not a bloody blog this month; a wiggy one instead. Perhaps it’s because I have such awful hair - a miserably skinny plait in childhood – t...

OK. Deep breath. Until I married in 1985, hunting was what I did in the winter. That is, I got on my horse and followed a pack of hounds...

My first history teacher was my grandfather, not just because he loved the past and took me to Hadrian’s Wall, but because he had histor...

Don’t read on if you’re squeamish. I’ll start gently. Earlier this month, Mary Hooper used the phrase that always strikes fear into the he...