Authors Electric

Anne Boleyn’s Last Ride (as it is Christmas - an (*almost) traditional Christmas ghost story for you all.) *** Back in 1971 most pubs closed at midday on Christmas Eve but as luck would have it our local wasn’t one of them. And so it was that, at 8pm, we slouched, in relative good mood, across the bridge over Carshalton ponds; past the Vinyl works that, in honour of the season, was not belching its usual fumes into the air from the far bank of the Wandle; and into the Lord Palmerston Public House. As always we avoided the spit and sawdust, because even we bikers had standards. In the saloon bar a battle-scarred bar top reflected one solitary strand of coloured lights strung above it, and the carpet’s bi-annual clean ensured that it pulled slightly less stickily at our boots. Yet, despite its shortcomings, entering the Lord Palm, with its dim light and beery fumes and welcoming warmth, was like sliding into comfy slippers. Most of the regulars were sprog-wrangling in their o...

Being the world’s slowest reader, I finally got to grips with Wolf Hall because of the television version, and because having already read Beyond Black I knew the lady is a writer of genius. It’s a measure of how wonderful I find it that after only ten days I‘m on page 313, which is nearly half way through. I thought the TV version was fantastic, too. Almost every scene, up to and including the execution, was mind-blowing. (I didn’t bother with a spoiler alert there, because if anyone doesn’t know who got the chop it might make them read the book. Sorry. I’m being silly.) Sitting in me lonely writer’s bed this morning, though – reluctant to give up and get up halfway through a chapter – I fell to wondering what was the motor for this exhaustive, off-centre, and truly rather frightening revivification of English history. Coupled with an interview or two I’d heard earlier (thank you, World Service), I realized it might be an investigation of what the West is going to ‘do’ about t...