Beer lines The Compasses lies on the edge of an old straight track in a hollow that shelters it from the cold south-west wind. It’s in the hamlet of Chicksgrove. In the field below, you can still see the outline of an oppidum, where Romano-Britons [...]

Marquez’s secret muse read more in Newsweek

Chatwin and Utz by Nicholas Shakespeare I once heard Bruce Chatwin read aloud from a work in progress. It was from his last novel, Utz. Ill with the disease that shortly would kill him, Chatwin sat at his kitchen table in Oxfordshire, glancing up from time to [...]

How Fishing Liberates the Mind read more in The New Statesman

The Falklands War Revisited read more in The New Statesman

Patrick White by Nicholas Shakespeare Out on the wastes of the Never-Never, That’s where the dead men lie! That’s where the heat-waves dance for ever – That’s where the dead men lie! BARCROFT BOAKE, Where the Dead Men Lie Human relationships are vast as deserts PATRICK WHITE, Voss [...]

William Somerset Maugham Introduction, by Nicholas Shakespeare “You’re queer fish, you writers.” Rosie Driffield “It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.” Willie Ashenden “I have never felt entirely myself,” wrote Maugham, “till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me.” [...]