It felt strange to be sitting in a café overlooking Edinburgh Castle as this week’s Brexit dramas unfolded in London. During my reporting years I would have been in the thick of it, notebook in hand, waiting for the key players to emerge from meeting rooms and discussions. Yet this week I was miles from the drama, happily sipping a flat white in The Elephant House, one of the Edinburgh ...keep reading
The first time I went to the Lake District with my husband I arrived in plimsolls and insisted they were fine for walking. I was stunned when he pointed at the mountain opposite the house where we were staying and said: “We’ll climb that one tomorrow.” At the time my idea of a walk was a gentle stroll through Battersea Park so Cat Bells and Maiden Moor looked like Mount ...keep reading
I’m a big fan of audiobooks. With two children at university I spend loads of time on the motorway – which means heated discussions about what we should listen to en route. My daughter likes garage and house music (I don’t know what either of those are either), my son’s partial to The Doors and I’m a Radio Four addict, so it’s hard to please us all. Audiobooks are the ...keep reading
There can’t be many writers capable of filling the cavern-like auditorium at Cheltenham Racecourse – but JK Rowling is one of them. All 2,000 seats for the Cheltenham Literature Festival event at the weekend had been snapped up in a trice, with people travelling from all over the world to hear their heroine speak. When interviewer James Runcie threw the session open to questions at the end several tearful young ...keep reading
In an interview with The Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead last weekend, JK Rowling said: “I just needed to write this book. I like it a lot, I’m proud of it, and that counts for me.” Well, I think she’s right to be proud of The Casual Vacancy, and I said as much when I reviewed it for the Daily Expressthis week. Even though Rowling’s first book for adults features “teenage sex, ...keep reading