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The Times Books
Reading silently, the acute pleasure of book and eye, is a sophisticated pleasure. Reading or reciting aloud is campfire stuff, good fun, muck in, and kids very soon lose their nerves and vie with one another in the high spirits natural to them.
Kids need two languages and a musical instrument - 23 February 2008
A friend of mine had a terrible dream where she was marooned on an island and menaced by penguins, pelicans and too-big ladybirds. Fortunately, she had a good Jungian analyst who pointed out that these oppressive creatures were all books.
Das Kapital - 09 February 2008
The Guardian
Picture this. I am staying in a remote cottage in Cornwall without a car. I have a temperature of 102, spots on my throat, delirium, and a book to finish. My desperate publisher suggests I call Hilary Fairclough, a homeopath who has a practise in London and Penzance. She sends round a remedy called Lachesis, made from snake venom. Four hours later I have no symptoms whatsoever.
Homeopathy - NOV 13 2007
It is impossible to begin at the beginning. Any scientist can tell you what happened in the first three seconds after the Big Bang, but none can say for sure what happened in the three seconds previous.
So it is with fiction; the moment I have begun, I can tell you something about the beginning. I might even be able to say, ‘Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father…’
Oranges are not the only fruit – NOV 3 2007
Financial Times
I have lived on the Thames twice – once in London in a warehouse on Shad Thames, before that place had any of its elegant or edible associations. There were no restaurants and no apartments, only the river, from which, at various times, I hauled Roman tessera and Elizabethan clay pipes. My second river-run was in Oxfordshire, on the tributary the Windrush, abundant with delicious but scary foreign crayfish, chucked in and left to multiply, so the story goes, by a careless chef, somewhere near Bray.
Peter Ackroyd – Thames: Sacred River. Book review in the Financial Times - Oct 6 2007
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