Glastonbury At 40

Back, exhausted, from an equatorial Glastonbury. On the last day I saw Ray Davies with the Crouch End Festival Choir, Richard Thompson and Stevie Wonder [who didn’t play ‘My Cherie Amour’ or ‘You Are The Sunshine of My Life’, but was still brilliant]. Ray Davies was...

Montaigne

Finished How To Live – A Life of Montaigne – in one question and twenty attempts at an answer by Sarah Bakewell. Was disappointed and found her repetitious. Have still to read Montaigne’s essays! 15th June. Gave the oration at the funeral of Seando Moore. Large...

Forgiving/Forgetting

Brian Rowan did a short interview with me across the phone for a story published in yesterday’s Belfast Telegraph. It is a good analytical piece on “Why we have to forgive before we start to forget.” Here it is in full: Saville represents a milestone in dealing with...

The Art of War

My interview with Julian Putkowski on Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’ was broadcast on the World Service of the BBC last Wednesday and is available here until next Wednesday. From the BBC website: “It was written by the military scholar Sun Tzu about 2,500 years ago and still...

Asking For Trouble

Finished Patricia Craig’s memoir, ‘Asking For Trouble’, the story of her dismissal from St Dominic’s Grammar School in 1959 over her alleged scandalous behaviour with lads in the Donegal gaeltacht, and the repercussions that had on the rest of her life. Patricia, who...

A Treasure of Chekhov

My order from the Folio Society of their new four-volume edition of sixty of Chekhov’s greatest stories, published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, arrived today. A treasure! Finished ‘Little Man, What Now?’ by Hans Fallada.Discovered a little hardback copy...