Category: Uncategorized
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Rev Richard Coles to take cosy crime series into monastery
Writer, broadcaster and Anglican priest, the Rev. Richard Coles has certainly had a varied career – stretching back to his synth pop days alongside Jimmy Somerville in The Communards. But after penning an acclaimed series of non-fiction books and memoirs, he turned his attention fiction – releasing his debut mystery novel in 2022. Speaking at…
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John Banville – ‘gentrifying the crime novel’
John Banville, who won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, confirmed he has written his last literary fiction, speaking in Bath this week. As he promoted his new book The Lock Up, he indicated that he would now be concentrating purely on his Strafford & Quirke mystery series. His new work is the…
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Sebastian Barry – ‘I’ve learnt to be very still’
Sebastian Barry spoke captivatingly in Bath, during his visit to promote his new novel Old God’s Time. The book deals movingly with the issues around historic child sex abuse in the Catholic church in Ireland, which Barry described as “not like a couple of rotten apples”, adding “it was more like a barrel of fermented…
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It’s getting better all the time
From a balcony perch at Christ Church in Bath on Monday evening, I listened intently to former children’s laureate Michael Rosen as he spoke of his approach to “getting better” – not just recovering from his critical bout of Covid, which saw him in an induced coma for 40 days; but also working through the…
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“Passage Home” for Jeffrey Archer
Love him or loathe him, the one thing you can’t do with Jeffrey Archer is ignore him. Bristolians certainly won’t miss him on Saturday, when the original Weston peer launches his new novel in a blaze of nostalgia, with a 1920s-style tea party at the Bristol Marriott Royal Hotel. There is a good reason for…
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Roger’s In The Pink
People always say it’s a bad idea – meeting your heroes. They’re likely to disappoint; shattering the idolised image you have built up of them over the years. So I was a bit nervous about meeting Roger McGough CBE in the flesh. It’s not like shaking his hand at a book signing or a literature…
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Now for something completely different… John Cleese
In a rare interview, John Cleese tells David Clensy about his plans to return to Clifton College; reveals he’s writing a new comedy reminiscent of Fawlty Towers; and predicts that ‘Barack Obama will transform the world’ When you’re due to interview John Cleese over the telephone, it’s difficult not to imagine him on the other…
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“It’s very flattering, when you have a fossilised reptile named after you” – Sir David Attenborough
As he prepares to unveil his final landmark documentary series, Life In Cold Blood, Sir David Attenborough talks to David Clensy about his life in broadcasting. Picture: Simon Galloway The world was a very different place back in 1979, when David Attenborough first unveiled his epic documentary Life On Earth.The ozone layer was a place…
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Frank McCourt: My education came from library books
There’s a wonderful irony to calling the Savoy Hotel to speak to Frank McCourt. He couldn’t have travelled much further from the Limerick slums of his childhood, which he immortalised in his Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes. But as his voice flows down the line, calm and wise and gnarled by the decades like a…
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Going down in history
Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is his best-received piece of work since the 60s. As tickets go on sale for its Hull dates later this year, David Clensy talks to the much-loved playwright For me, the idea of being in a theatre with Alan Bennett was on a par with marlin fishing with Ernest Hemingway,…
davidclensy.com 