Nothing Tra La La?

View from our hotel Back from a nice week in hot, sunny Athens. As the Dr said, it's been fascinating to see what the kids made of the p...

Sisters Laleh and Myung live deep inside the Whale of Babel, but can pass from this extraordinary, vast creature into other worlds. But Myun...

Ulysses Temper is a British soldier in Italy during the Second World War. There he befriends art historian Evelyn Skinner, and helps her res...

I've had the most amazing few days in Geneva as a guest of Ideas Square at CERN . It's the first time I've been out of the UK in...

This is a very good biography of a very successful writer and pretty awful human being. Michael Bartholomew brilliantly teases out the real ...

I’m struggling a bit with prose for grown-ups, so over the last month worked my way through The Adventures of Tintin , an eight-volume box-s...

Marianne Brocklehurst's diary Victorian Queens of Ancient Egypt , my fourth documentary for Radio 3's Sunday Feature will be b...

The Lord of Chaos and I had a brilliant short break in Liverpool, visiting relatives and seeing the sights. It helped that the weather was ...

“Agatha Christie remained inwardly detached from archaeology. She relished the archaeological life in remote country and made good use ...

"Foreigners nearly always wish to simplify the Middle East, Agnes. They cannot tolerate to feel ignorant long enough to understand ...

Episode 293: Colony in Space , episode 1 First broadcast: 6.10 pm, Saturday, 10 April 1971 << back to 1970 Jo unimpressed by all...

Beyond the Wall – Writing a Path Through Palestine is a short, haunting account of a trip Bidisha made there last year. I read it in an a...

Out in shops now is  Ace Adventures  DVD box , with two  Doctor Who  stories featuring the Seventh Doctor and his friend Ace. Among the jam...