Orion Website Sitting through an interminable formal luncheon, novelist Jeff Lindsay found his mind drifting. It’s a situation with which we can all identify. But instead of wondering whether he had left the iron on or what he was having for supper that night, Jeff’s thoughts went somewhere very dark
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The Independent on Sunday 28th October 2007 When Cecil Day-Lewis lay dying in the home of Kingsley Amis, his two young children, Tama-sin and Daniel, would slink off together to practice a trick their host had shown them: to recite the entire alphabet through a single burp. It is the
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Independent on Sunday 23 September 2007 Lynda La Plante is raging. She is furious, her temper as fiery as her flame red hair. “How many Romanians are in? How many Polish are in?” she splutters in the midst of a diatribe about the NHS, over-crowded prisons and illegal immigration. “They
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Orion Books If ever geneticist Stephen Pinker gets his hands on Duncan Bannatyne’s DNA, I am certain he will find entrepreneurship oozing from the multimillionaire businessman’s genes. Because even as a five-year-old, the fiercest dragon in the BBC’s famous Dragon’s Den had a determination to make money. “I just wanted
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The Independent on Sunday 5th August 2007 As his car rolled through an underpass in central Los Angeles, Toby Barlow, a high-flying advertising executive, saw a pack of 30 dogs tearing through the city. “They come out of the canyon into the city and take a couple of housedogs back
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The Independent on Sunday Russia has entranced Marcus Sedgwick since childhood. As a baby his mother staved off boredom by teaching herself the language. As a teenager in the early 1980s, his parents visited the country, returning with amazing stories of friendly people that fired the imagination of the future
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Orion There is a chilling moment in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin, the impressive biography of the young dictator and prequel to his award-winning 2004 biography Stalin. Not chilling because it betrays the violent repression that would mark his rule, but chilling because it challenges the assumption that the man
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MusicOMH The guys look knackered. Slumped on a sofa Matt Berninger, lyricist and lead singer, and Aaron Dessner, guitarist and bassist, with The National are near the end of the first of two days of back-to-back media interviews. They flew in on the red-eye from New York this morning and
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Orion Website Without fear of contradiction, I can write that Michael Collins will be the only extreme athlete, computing, Booker Prize nominee I will ever interview. The thought amuses the Irish author, who has spent the past 25 years not just living in the USA, but using his pen to
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‘I excluded myself completely from the story,’ Mark Haddon says of the writing of The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time. ‘I don’t get in the way and there are no purple passages.’
