Book Collector
There’s an old adage that one should never meet one’s heroes… But I’ve always thrown caution to the wind with that saying and jump at the chance to come face to face with the people I have always admired. So, when R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe made an appearance in Rome to present his photography monograph …
With the World Cup final just days away, it felt like the right moment to put together a shortlist of football writing that goes a bit deeper than the back pages. These aren’t match reports or player memoirs, they’re the kind of books that use football as a way into something bigger, culture, psychology, politics, …
I arrived at the Stieg Larsson party a little late. For a while I’d been noticing the Millennium trilogy in Italian translation, stacked up in huge pyraminds in bookshops all over Rome, impossible to miss, but for some reason I resisted the marketing push. It was my writer friend Adam Williams who finally gave me …
There are pianists who play the notes, and pianists who play the notes AND the room. Lang Lang has always been firmly in the second camp, and that is precisely why critics have spent decades unsure what to do with him. Too theatrical, too demonstrative …simply too much! What they are now reluctantly beginning to …
On 8 May 2026, David Attenborough turns one hundred years old. The BBC is marking the occasion with a week of new programming, a live event at the Royal Albert Hall, and what amounts to a national moment of reflection on how one voice, over seven decades, has brought the natural world into sharp focus …
The signed copy of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley: Essential Poems that sits in my collection is not a rare first edition, but it comes with a great story and the somewhat bittersweet memory of the day I met Julian Sands. On the afternoon of 6 September 2019, the library of the Keats-Shelley House …
The BBC’s acclaimed new adaptation is introducing William Golding’s greatest novel to a generation that has never read it. For those coming to it fresh, and for those returning, the question is always the same: how did one book get so much so right? …
As the red carpet is rolled out and anticipation builds for this year’s Academy Awards, attention naturally turns to the performances, the directors and the spectacle of the ceremony itself. Yet the Best Adapted Screenplay nominees remind us that long before the cameras rolled, these stories first lived on the printed page. This year’s Best …
There are occasions when a bookplate does more than mark ownership. It becomes part of the book’s story. Pasted inside a 1931 First American Edition of The Waves by Virginia Woolf, published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, is a striking Art Deco bookplate entitled ‘Creation’. Designed for a certain David Adams, it is the work …
Few names in children’s literature feel as solid and dependable as Carolyn Keene. For generations, she has been the guiding hand behind Nancy Drew’s sharp mind, steady nerve, and unmistakable confidence. Yet Carolyn Keene never existed. She was a literary façade, carefully constructed to conceal a far more complex and fascinating reality. The Nancy Drew …
