Activity

‘Has anyone noticed? On planes, they’ve started calling passengers customers.’

Blue, at least, had certainly noticed it, and thought it comical; and for a while we found some diversion in a word-replacement game of the kind we often played…

‘ “The passenger is always right.” “Michelangelo Ant…

‘He can’t…’ Her eyes were downcast, directed at her shoes or the silky traces of April frost on the blades of grass. My stepmother lowered her head when she spoke. It was her dyed and parted hair I had to interpret (from The Bellarosa Connection). Except Rosamund’s parted hair was undyed and grew w…

Slot pounced. ‘The story is less comprehensive than the novel. In a short story you’re more aware of limitations of space. So the story provides fewer…’

I paid the extras on the bill and went upstairs for the bag, into which Elena was forcing stray pairs of shoes. I said,

‘It’s a good job J…

[...] Nabokov has elsewhere made the point that all writers who are any good are funny. Not funny all the time – but funny. All the lasting British novelists are funny; the same is true of the Russians (Gogol, Dostoevsky, and, yes, Tolstoy are funny); and this became true of the Americans. Franz Ka…

Jed Slot was in the hotel bar – being interviewed. Himself a teetotaller, Jed did all his interviews in the hotel bar, and I’d arranged to do all my interviews in there too; but whereas Slot’s sessions lasted all day long and well into the night, mine only accounted for teatime (so I often went in …