At a moving ceremony on Friday evening a prayer was said for my aunt Priscilla, who died 41 years ago. In 1938, she had become a Catholic in order to marry her first husband, and then, rather like Graham Greene, started to take her new faith seriously, but concealing this from her friends and English family. Only to [...]

The whole business of being published is the literary equivalent of the bends. Submerged for four years during the researching and writing, you are propelled, gasping and choking, to the surface. From having existed, as it were, as a solitary fish – living a life of "problems and drudgery" in Halldor Laxness's phrase about writing – [...]

What compels you to buy a novel? I bought Offshore on the day after it won the 1979 Booker Prize. This was partly in response to the dismissive BBC Book Programme about "this trouble-creating Booker Prize" in which Robert Robinson, himself an abysmal novelist, proposed to everyone on the panel, including Fitzgerald, that "the Booker judges [...]

Talk in the Villa Rothsay Hotel was of an impending authors' rebellion against free appearances. One director of a British Literary Festival, so the story goes, recently offered an American novelist £20,000 to appear, plus a first class air ticket. And yet we are supposed to be on a level playing field. The last time [...]