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I was reading Sarah Bakewell’s excellent book, How to Live, on the writings of Montaigne, today. You can imagine it; me laid out on my French terrace, blue skies, rearing mountain cliffs behind me, spring blossom from the Wisteria above, the ratcheting croaks of carrion crows in the woods and a particularly tuneful blackbird mimic… Know More
A marketer said I should be more explicit about the story of the Azimuth Trilogy. Here’s what I have written. It’s now on the site. A royal historian, Kamil, is called to the court of his emperor. He is commissioned to write the history of a famous man, a magus, who lived many centuries before… Know More
I watched a programme made for the telly about the Dark Ages and how light they actually were. This one focused on Christianity in the first 400 years after the supposed birth of Christ. It examined the art of that period. For three hundred years there were no depictions of Christ at all, only ciphers,… Know More
A soldier dies in London, hacked to pieces by two extremists. It is horrific. It is in broad daylight. The killers display a crazed imperturbability to the hand held cameras of ordinary passers-by. A woman bravely accosts them. Police arrive and shoot and injure them before they themselves are attacked. The media circus follows. The… Know More
I’m about half way through a final edit of A Woman Who Kills. It ended up being 230 pages rather than the fifty or so that I had imagined. (See last blog.)Having finished Azimuth, got it printed and then put on every conceivable device platform, I wanted to keep writing but at a less intense… Know More
I started what I thought was a novella before Christmas, following the somewhat successful completion of three novellas which I offered free on my website and which have amassed nearly 150,000 pages viewed in just over two months. See them at: www.chronometerpublications.me Like best laid plans in life, the novella has gone astray. 200 pages… Know More
Azimuth may well be intimidating to some, such is the considerable heft of the trilogy, though this may be one advantage of reading them separately, or on a Kindle, where you get all the joy of the text, without the workout of holding up the book. Once opened it is a joy. The first thing… Know More
I am not going to say much. I have been watching Sky, BBC and various other news stations. I have seen the jowly conservatives in obeisance. I’ve seen the angry younger generations of those she abused, celebrating her death like some medieval pageant. I’ve seen the re-writing of history. I’ve heard over and over again… Know More
I decided to wait until I’d read all three of these excellent books before reviewing, because I knew in advance that the threads of the first continue all the way through to the end of the third. Now, my memory of the first book is almost as a prelude to the other two. There are… Know More
I don’t think it has rained more than three times since October when we got back to Accra from France. The UK may be suffering the coldest Easter on record with temperatures of minus ten degrees (I remember swimming in the North Sea at Easter up near Newcastle, at much this time of year and,… Know More