When The Story of Holly and Ivy was first published, it was set in the Buckinghamshire market town of Aylesbury. In later editions the location was switched to somewhere called Appleton. (There is a village of Appleton in Oxfordshire, but the descriptions in the book don’t fit it.) Has the book lost something as a result? “And where does your grandmother… Continue reading
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Clever chef brings haute cuisine twist to plant-based meat
Avoiding meat and dairy is one of the single biggest ways to reduce a person’s impact on the Earth. But if people resolve to cut down on the meat they eat, or give it up altogether, how attractive, or even palatable, are the alternatives? In one New York restaurant an inventive chef is creating a plant-based… Continue reading
Sobers six hit perfection at Swansea: That was the Day
53 years today, on Saturday, August 31st, 1968, Garfield Sobers became the first player in the history of cricket to hit every ball of an over for six. I was there and I wrote a book about it, Sobers six hit perfection at Swansea: That was the Day. Sobers was captaining Nottinghamshire that day, in a… Continue reading
How BeaconLit was built – creating a book festival in an English village
Update BeaconLit is back as a mini-festival on Saturday 10 July 2021. The festival, which launched in 2013 and ran every year until the Covid pandemic, was cancelled in 2020. The committee decided Festival 2021 could not go ahead in its usual format of a full day event, with author panels, interviews, workshops etc. But… Continue reading
How the National Theatre’s Under Milk Wood is the perfect post-lockdown play
“The itinerant, ultra-sociable Thomas would have been the last person to be constrained by social distancing, red and amber lists, and isolation. He was a man of the pub. It’s hard to see how he could have survived as a writer without beer-fuelled social interaction.” Dylan Thomas knew Under Milk Wood was good, even in… Continue reading
Is the court of public opinion siding with climate protesters?
An interesting piece in the Guardian by Peter Hain (Lord Hain, the former Labour minister.) He makes a strong case for a halt to all pending trials of Extinction Rebellion (ER) activists, accused of deliberate criminal damage in their attempts to highlight the climate crisis. Last month (April 2021) six members of ER, charged with… Continue reading