The phrase ' tour d'horizon' is one I heard on  the 4th February, when I was on my walk, listening to one of my favourite podca...

  A photo can tell you so much.   When I was writing  Hope against Hope , set in Belfast and along the new Irish border in 1921, I spent a l...

[I've been thinking about travel, in these times without, and would like to repost something I did back in 2013 about the intrepid, fier...

How do you write creatively when you’re living through a global crisis? For much of the first lockdown it seemed that – for me at least – th...

  I was going to write about the extraordinary and the enormous today, but we’re living with too much history right now. We don’t need the e...

    Greek women are on a roll. No, not Arianna Huffington, Melina Mercouri and Irene Papas, but their counterparts in ancient mythology. We ...

Human nature, it seems, has changed little since AD 91, when the emperor Domitian issued a set of laws for the town of Irni. Many of them ma...