Welcome to this website's latest feature - the blog. I'm writing this on Easter Saturday, 11 April, having spent the day walking the dog, writing a radio column for The Tablet, listening desultorily to Norwich City lose 1-2 to Swansea, and reading Anne Chisholm's excellent biography of Frances Partridge, which I am reviewing for the Independent. Readers who imagine there is any glamour in the literary life are labouring under a grievous misapprehension.

Should anyone out there be interested in the wider picture, though interested to see what readers (and reviewers) make of ASK ALICE, which was published in the UK last week, I'm currently half-way through a new novel, DERBY DAY, about Victorian horse-racing, which is due to be handed in at the very start of next year. I've also finished a short, Graham Greene-ish entertainment, set in '30s London, called AT THE CHIME OF A CITY CLOCK, which Constable & Robinson will be publishing early next year under the pseudonym 'Felix Benjamin.' And it would be nice, at some point, to think of a new non-fiction project...