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Find a book club
Find a Book Club, a club that does what it says on the tin, asked me to recommend 10 books for book clubs (including two of my own).
Category Archives: Places
Tom Titanic: a Welsh hero remembered
On 15 April I went to Cemaes, the northernmost town on the Ynys Môn coast, with my cousin Alex Leslie, and my sister Lucinda Mackworth-Young. We were there because Cemaes is the town where Thomas William Jones was born, on … Continue reading
Posted in BLue Plaques, History, Kindness, Places, Talks, Titanic, Travel
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Ask not what trees can do for us, but what we can do for trees
Last weekend I walked through a wood. Sunlight filtered through the leaves and made me think how medieval stonemasons must have been inspired by the branches of trees gathered in arching vaults above them when they imagined their cathedrals. In … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Climate Change, Creativity, Fiction, Places, Poetry, Recycling, Trees, Walking
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Worldwide Ways of Welcoming New Year
Different peoples in different countries do different things to welcome a new year. In SIBERIA, in Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world, and in the River Lena nearby, a Christmas Tree is taken to the bottom on … Continue reading
Posted in Allyship, Antiracism, Creativity, Flowers/Blossom, Food, Gifts, Human Rights, New Year Celebrations, Places, Racism
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City Tales, and Hive
Since 2004, Oxford University Press has been publishing volumes of City Tales, collections of short stories set in European cities translated into English. The guiding idea is to give the English-speaking reading traveller (I paraphrase): Stories expertly translated by writers with an … Continue reading
Jericho Writers’ Self-Editing Your Novel Course, and the wonders of Atlas Obscura: destinations, food and drink
I’m in the final week of Jericho Writers’ Self-Editing your novel course run by Debi Alper and Emma Darwin and all I can say is if you’ve written a first (or even a twenty-first) draft of a novel and you know something’s … Continue reading
Posted in Drink, Fiction, Food, Places, Rewriting, Storytelling, Third Novel, Travel, Uncategorized, Writing, Writing Courses
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Literary Villains, Literary Summer Reads and an idyllic treehouse in East Sussex (where you can stay)
Forty of the Best Villains in Literature appear in this article at The Literary Hub (where you’ll find many literary goodies). The villains include the obvious: Mr Hyde, Mrs Danvers, Uriah Heep, Mr Rochester, Dr Frankenstein, Hannibal Lecter and many more. But … Continue reading
Posted in Creativity, Fiction, Places, Things I'd Love to Have Made, Writing
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Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata and Dioni Mazaraki’s silver jewellery
I’ve read all Rose Tremain‘s novels and I love the fact that they fail to fit neatly into any particular category (except the category of beautifully written stories about the way we are and how we become). They’re always and essentially different, one from … Continue reading
Posted in Artists, Creativity, Design, Fiction, Places, Things I'd Love to Have Made, Writers
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Mindfulness, Fitzroy Square and Subversive (Guerilla) Gardening
A few weeks ago I did an Introduction to Mindfulness day at the London Mindfulness Project (whose rooms are in the astonishingly beautiful, Georgian Fitzroy Square, at No 6): No 6, according to the Georgian Society, has: Over the years … Continue reading
Leslie House, Fife; and the Daily Good
My great-grandmother Noël Rothes, whose life was the initial inspiration for my novel The Dance of Love, lived at Leslie House between 1904 and 1919. The house was burned to the ground while under restoration in 2009. It’s been the … Continue reading
The Launch of The Dance of Love, History of the Rain, and Emily Young’s Kew Gardens angel video
The DANCE of LOVE was launched at the wonderful Barnes Bookshop last Thursday: I wrote about on Robert Hale’s blog – the book’s publishers – here. It was a happy family affair: my whole family was there: my two younger sisters smuggled … Continue reading
Posted in Artists, Dance of Love, The, Design, Places, Reviews, Things I'd Love to Have Made, Writers, Writing
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