gofund.me/320da323e I have been able to book conference participation now. Further donations go to hotel and travel costs etc. thank you so much for your generosity.

Bowness-on-Solway. Next weekend I’ll dip my toes in the North Sea at Tynemouth. Till then it’s just me, Hadrian’s Wall, and a copy of Don Quixote.

MUPPET MRS DALLOWAY, with Emma Thompson.

The mastery of the Ladybird artists. House keys (Baby’s First Book, 1973) Artist: H Woolley

Better late than never. Brilliant prose and almost insane levels of psychological and social observation combine to go nuclear here. What an incredible book. Goes on the modestly sized but very potent shelf labeled “why bother to write.”

And off it goes, Richard Lea’s Personal Anthology, fifty and alone, rambling about a country nearly uninhabited, wearing a frock-coat and shabby canvas trousers, sweating under the electric-yellow dome of the municipal force field, shooting a straight piss into the base of the guava tree…

Yeah right, cos À La Recherche du Temps Perdu is basically Marcel remembering every madeleine he’s ever eaten 🙄

As a rhetorical gambit, “This is a hill I will die on” tends to work best when you don’t immediately start surrounding your position with caveats.

Reread The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Deliciously odd. Despite contentions to the contrary, it contains ample context & analysis but inveigles them, often ironised, efficiently in a compact narrative. Comic & alarming by turns, a picture of mangled potential, eccentricity, egotism, awakening & abuse

This FT analysis shows that the third most popular current option for 2016 Leave voters, after Reform and Conservative, is to be dead.

We'll have another Personal Anthology this Friday. This week's guest editor, picking and introducing a dozen favourite short stories, is Richard Lea, editor of @fictionable.bsky.social. Sign up here if you don't already subscribe. RT if you do! apersonalanthology.substack.com/about

2026 Reading 35: Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, tr Grace Frick. Wanted to read for ages, based in part on recommendations here. Read now because I’m walking Hadrian’s Wall next week (though Britain takes up only a couple of pages). A hugely impressive and largely enjoyable achievement.

I read them the other way round, and began to feel Claudius very thin by comparison, sadly. Similarly John Williams' Augustus. Yourcenar is unlike anyone else. I am torn between Hadrian and The Abyss as my favourite. Wonderful essays too, not so well known here: apollo-magazine.com/marguerite-y...

New on the blog today, I've written about SHAME by Annie Ernaux (tr Tanya Leslie). Another illuminating slice of autofiction from Ernaux, which takes as its jumping-off point a terrifying incident that took place shortly before her 12th birthday #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/06/18/s...

Post the best picture you have ever taken of your pet (if you feel like it)

YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK

I’ve managed to avoid hearing Trump’s voice for what now seems like months. Just listening to him on Radio 4 News now, and oh boy he sounds like he’s in a bad bad way.

We'll have another Personal Anthology this Friday. This week's guest editor, picking and introducing a dozen favourite short stories, is Richard Lea, editor of @fictionable.bsky.social. Sign up here if you don't already subscribe. RT if you do! apersonalanthology.substack.com/about

Congratulations to our pal Lara Pawson who is today being sworn in as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.

This is a must read thread if you’re concerned about what AI (or the perception of AI) is able to do to intellectual labour & academic work

I'm always on the lookout for contributors to apersonalanthology.com. Do you love short stories? Can you communicate that love in words? Can you bear to pick just 12 of them? Then get in touch! The substack has 2,500+ subscribers. The archive has 3,500+ individual entries. Help me build it!

I've just updated the apersonalanthology.com website with @gregorynorminton.bsky.social's contribution – his pick of a dozen favourite short stories. Check them out!

I like the idea that you need to secure "long-term stability" in order to "advance" your "turnaround plan". That's, uh, not how turnaround plans are supposed to work.

Charity shop Maigret bonanza.

Tonight's launch at The Wheatsheaf Tavern in Fitzrovia of Guillermo Stitch's 'The Coast of Everything.' You had to be there.

Picked this up at Housmans after a browse. Read a lot on train back. Tom McCarthy / Luke Kennard-y premise, shadowy 'research' agency. But the writing - woah. Real shades of frenetic, fragmented & incisive Savage Detectives. Not read a book that felt it was written today. Good fucking book. Buy it!

This is an excellent article about ticks in Scotland (relevant for ticks elsewhere too).

Reading The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch for the first time and I can't stop thinking about this:

Public information alert: a rare UK concert date for superb French chanteuse Camille next March 11th at the London Palladium. Here’s a clip of an earlier live performance to give an idea of what might be in store. (I’ve not seen her live as yet. I’m v excited!) youtu.be/eJd3SatPlDo?...

God that was a bracing nap. Like falling down a well.

Just sold Middlemarch to an ACTOR who is going to be IN MIDDLEMARCH with the RSC* imminently (btw this looks like being a fantastic production. Two full-length plays, like that amazing production of Nicholas Nickleby from BITD) *ooh get her

An increase in classics being read on the tube since the Guardian Top 100 list? I’ll believe it when I see a Middlemarch. (Haven’t seen one yet.)

At the skatepark reading Anita Brookner

Angela Moulton

This sent me down a memory hole to discovering London in the late 80s, thanks to the factory shift system. letterboxd.com/danielmudfor...

Question: do you dress like you write?

“The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.” Marguerite Youcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian.

Just idly wondering what the difference is between a nap and a snooze.

Excited to announce that I will be performing Il Faut Danser (You Must Dance), a one-woman show about my mother and grandmother's lives in Algeria in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, on Thursday 2nd July, 7pm at Stanley Arts, part of the Croydonites festival stanleyarts.org/event/croydo...

Join us for autofiction à la française an online Masterclass with @londonlitlab.bsky.social on 18th June. We’ll be Writing resistance, reading translations of Ernaux, Édouard Louis and more, getting inspired to reimagine the self. Can’t wait! Tickets here: www.londonlitlab.co.uk/course/autof...

2026 Reading 34: This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes. What a strange book this is. “Funny and engaging” is accurate – I laughed out loud a number of times – and “unexpected pleasures” is nearly right. The pleasures do eventually become predictable, even in their unexpectedness.

What an intensely strange & wonderful book. Tomcat Murr (a cat!) has written his autobiography but it gets mixed up at the printers with a book about a composer. One life is being told backwards, while the other forwards. Alternating, clashing, weaving two consciousnesses in the dream of reality.

- Darling, I was thinking of buying you one of those very practical wipe-down laminate tables. - Formica? - Well, I was thinking for the kitchen, but I’m sure that might work.

Settle a work debate. What is the 'proper' British pronunciation of tortoise. Tortoys (like) or Tortuss (retweet). Now go!

“Whatever it is you need to know, you already know” is a line from This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes that seems like such intuitive unequivocal truth that I can’t believe it hasn’t already hardened into a self-help mantra and been used so widely that we’re already sick of it.

"Literature is a Spanish castle that through the energies of its construction produces its own foundations. And Gen-AI, because it has read everything – because it has *stolen everything* – should be able to draw on the same deep wide reservoir of literature that I do. Only it can't."

And off it goes, Gregory Norminton’s Personal Anthology, thinking of its dark red slippers, which matched its dressing gown, rampant under the spur of loneliness, tramping the linen clean, having lunched lightly in the graveyard... apersonalanthology.substack.com/p/a-personal...

I’m planning a London launch for How Do People Stay the Same, on or around 23 July. Please like or comment if you’re potentially around.

A reminder that A Personal Anthology returns tomorrow, with guest editor @gregorynorminton.bsky.social picking and introducing a dozen favourite short stories. And, ooh, there are some doozies in there. Hitting inboxes at 2pm. Sign up here if you don't already. apersonalanthology.substack.com/about

I've posted a few images of frogs recently, but our farm is coming down with them at the moment, and it's just so lovely to see. Rewilding reverses nature loss *head on*.