Several years ago, BBC Radio 4 did an adaptation of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. If you don’t know Radio Four, this is the radio station that covers not music, but the word: dramas, comedies, in-depth reports on news and history, it’s a genius source of wit and wisdom the like of which does not really exist in…
Read MoreThe marvelous Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park has an upcoming: Afternoon of Chaos, Killing, Crime, & Kidnapping @ Kepler’s Now, that may sound somewhat exhausting, but if you’re a fan of crime fiction, and you’re interested in how we writers do our thing, come and listen to 1) Plotters vs Pantsers, 2) It’s Not Me,…
Read MoreIn England recently, it was hawthorn season. In Dreaming Spies, Russell reflects on the resemblance to cherry blossoms: The …thick white hawthorn blossom overhead made me imagine for an instant that I was kneeling for a hanami, setting out a picnic beneath flowering trees.
Read MoreI spent a few days in Sussex recently, and… In my seven weeks of peripatetic reading amongst the sheep (which tended to move out of my way) and the gorse bushes (to which I had painfully developed an instinctive awareness) I had never before stepped on a person…
Read MoreThere’s a new Fest in town: the Bay Area Book Festival (first annual?) blows into Berkeley this weekend, and I’ll be there on Saturday, to chat about, well, books. And writing and crime and stuff. So if you’re in the Bay Area, come and play! Kids stuff, adult things, Grateful Dead and John Scalzi (no,…
Read MoreThe English countryside is as studded with gems as a royal tiara. It would be a lifetime’s work to see all the castles, manor houses, religious houses, garden follies, historical buildings, and the rest—and that’s before one adds gardens, archaeological sites, and actual natural beauties onto the list. Now, I appreciate the big names on…
Read MoreI spent thirty years of my life in a part of the world dedicated to the strawberry: Watsonville, home of Driscoll berries. However, it was not until I came to England that I met the true berry, the English berry, pale and acidic and short-lived. When you buy a packet of them here, the label…
Read MoreOn Friday I made the trip back into London from the city’s Western Reaches, headed this time to my favorite non-grandmother’s-attic museum, the Museum of London. From the Stone Age river-side village to Roman Londinium to Victoria’s smoke-choked London, the museum uncovers the city’s layers as archaeological digs have done– brilliantly presented to prove…
Read MoreWednesday we (ie: self and daughter’s family with two small persons) reluctantly extracted ourselves from the farmyard near Thame where we’ve been talking to cows and magpies the past couple of weeks and flung ourselves at London, to insert said daughter’s family onto an aeroplane Thursday morning. A process that proved rather more troublesome than…
Read MoreMy mother made precisely one trip out of the westernmost coast of the United States. In the summer of 1984, I took her to England for three weeks: all her lifetime’s travel in less than a month. We were mostly in Oxford, where she reveled in the sound of the bells, the boats on the…
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