You might have heard about the films made from the books—which are OK if a bit glib, but nowhere near as good as the books. These are actually the best fantasy novels I’ve read in years.

The trick is to learn enough facts and absorb enough cultural atmosphere to feel as though you are comfortable in that period; but not to think you need to know absolutely everything.

Every writer knows the moment when a vague story idea starts thickening into something much more real. For me, that often happens when I start getting the names of my main characters.

‘Crossover’ novels are a big thing in publishing these days, since the success of children’s and YA writers such as Stephenie Meyer, JK Rowling and Philip Pullman, who have found readers on both sides of the age divide. But it’s also a controversial thing, at least for some critics.
 

I could see Chekhov’s doomed families sitting at shabby tables in the long grass and frenzy of flowers of a beautiful, tender, so ephemeral Russian spring in the countryside.

We think about how it was at the beginning, when we arrived on a snowy winter’s morning with the city draped in chilly grandeur, the trees skeletal not luxuriant, the Seine cold and murky-brown not greenly sparkling, almost inviting, like now.

Having gone around two literary houses  recently, those of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne, I was struck by the contrasting way in which their massive fame impacted on their family life.

Forget all that business about flags and anthems and agonising […]

This is a sobering place, with its thousands of graves, and the 11,000 names engraved on the Memorial itself - the names of all those Australian soldiers who died in France but whose gravesite is unknown.