Column by David in The Times.
I WAS TALKING TO LIONEL SHRIVER the other day (this isn’t a straightforward piece of literary name-dropping, she’d just been on my BBC Four panel show about books, which regular readers may remember I mentioned a few weeks back as a project I thought I might do: well, I did) and she told me how, since the shooting of 32 students at Virginia Tech, her phone has rung repeatedly with requests for interviews and opinion pieces.
Column by David in The Times.
I WAS DRIVING LATE AT NIGHT LAST week, listening to Radio 4 — as people of my age tend to, frightened of hearing music at such hours that will make them feel as if they’re being tortured in Guantanamo Bay — when I suddenly perceived, just under the normally confident timbre of the continuity announcer, something of a nervy wobble. Since he was not saying that we were about to cross live to Downing Street in order for the Prime Minister to declare war on Iran, but introducing A Book at Bedtime — On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan’s latest, his narrative of one couple’s sexually apprehensive honeymoon in Dorset in the early 1960s — I wondered what could be bringing this on.