He looked at what he'd written and thought, “Ah, I must find out what a hobbit is”
By Marion McLeod in From Our Archive
Issue Listener Plus 2475 8th Dec 2012
From the Listener archive: how Tolkien began with a blank sheet, and worked backwards.
Toby’s Room by Pat Barker – review
Subscriber contentBy Marion McLeod in Books
Issue 3785 24th Nov 2012
Harold Gillies is just one of the historical figures in Pat Barker’s return to her métier of World War I.
Skios by Michael Frayn review
By Marion McLeod in Books
Issue 3767 21st Jul 2012
He’s done it on stage with Noises Off, but can Michael Frayn do it for the page, too?
The Beginner’s Goodbye by Anne Tyler review
By Marion McLeod in Books
Issue 3759 26th May 2012
A charming but slight ghost story from Anne Tyler.
Interview: Susannah Clapp
By Marion McLeod in Books
Issue 3750 23rd Mar 2012
Angela Carter’s imaginative flights were not confined to the page, the writer’s friend and literary executor Susannah Clapp reveals in a new memoir 20 years after her death.
Interview: biographer Selina Hastings
Subscriber contentBy Marion McLeod in Books
Issue 3747 3rd Mar 2012
From Nancy Mitford to Evelyn Waugh to Somerset Maugham, biographer Selina Hastings’s subjects share more than writing as a trait.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes review
By Marion McLeod in Books
Issue 3726 8th Oct 2011
Barnes's perfectly formed latest novel has just won the Man Booker Prize.
Alias Smith & Oates
By Marion McLeod in Books
Issue 3698 26th Mar 2011
The widow of Ray Smith is better known as Joyce Carol Oates - a writer so prolific she has even published under two other names.
Cat woman
By Marion McLeod in Books
Issue 3665 7th Aug 2010
Judith Kerr comes from a family of high achievers and had long reconciled herself to being the unfamous one. But then she wrote children's classics The Tiger Who Came to Tea and Mog the Forgetful Cat.