Fantasy’s moment has come

Thus spake Lev Grossman at the Oxford Literary Festival, in an hour of erudite, funny, self-effacing brilliance that made me jump up and punch …

PHOENIX | Where Talent Rises

What are you wearing? What proportion of it is black, white, cream, grey, navy, camel, nude or beige? Be honest, now. Here’s a little snippet …

Let’s build ourselves a book nest

It’s been a while coming, but the brand new mollyflatt.com is most definitely alive!

This is an interesting autumn for me. I have gone part-time …

New horizons

So, first this happened.

Then this.

And then I blew whole facade of sophistication and glamour away at an Umbrian waterfall, to …

Farewell, Miss Flatt

So, I’m off to get hitched and then headed to Tuscany to have lots of sex for two weeks. Hoorah!

I am taking my laptop …

The baby

‘Do you think’, said my mother, browsing forestry-themed Playmobil on her iPad, ‘that we should buy her one of those books? The ones that …

Whisper it

Was there ever a word more onomatopoeic than silk?

It is a tease: a sliding touch followed by a flick, a breath that ends in …

Emerge blinking

Due to the recent glut of long weekends (and indeed big thanks for those to, respectively, Jesus, the Royals and May) I …

Chaucer was a feminist. Discuss.

If you study literature at university, everyone warns, it’ll take all the joy out of reading. Your innocent pleasure in page-turning plots and made-up people …

Radio matters

It’s a wonderful scene.

A pillared and statued monument to 1920s Britishness presides over the theatreland bustle of Aldwych, scarred from wartime bombing but …

Neuroscience fiction

Feeling a bit end-of-winter fuzzy? Awash with Wednesday ennui? Fed up with days filled with frustration, procrastination and possibilities that never quite manifest?

Then read …

The meaning of the universe, and related ephemera

The Japanese earthquake and tsunami is one of those events that cracks our narrow minds apart and sends a great wave of perspective flushing through …

London Fashion Geek

Oh, Lord. It’s tweets like this that make Getting Things Done very hard indeed.

I’d love to convey the impression that I am …

Slow journalism

Slow journalism comes to me so naturally that I’ve taken about five years to write about it.

On Wednesday morning, the Today programme (I cannot …

Adjectivitis

For a while there, I tried to be averse to adverbs.

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs” froths Stephen, the King of …