Archive for September, 2007

• The art of Roman bread

  Panella is a bit snooty. The place describes itself as ‘L’Arte del Pane’, the Art of Bread. I got a very Roman matronly wag of the finger for daring to take a picture - without flash I might add - inside the shop. But I suppose if you’re this good at your job….
  Panella makes bread [...]

  Posted on 30/09/07 | 1 comment | read on

• Sacro e Profana, an unusual Roman restaurant

  I hate recommending restaurants in Italy for two reasons: they change quickly, and my preference may not be yours. Two old favourites - the pizzeria Li Rioni near the Colosseum and Ditirambo in the Campo Dei Fiori - have been pretty poor of late and are definitely off my list.
  But here’s a very unusual place [...]

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• The best busker in Rome?

  My chapter in The Chopin Manuscript features a very talented busker outside the Pantheon in Rome. But Felicia Kaminski is an invention of my imagination. Among the frauds and the phoneys working the streets of Rome hunting tourist euros, there is true talent. Watch the very brief movie above for proof.
  This was shot this [...]

  Posted on 28/09/07 | no comments | read on

• Will Wye need to be saved again?

  It’s only just over a year since my local village of Wye was saved from grasping, greedy development by a bunch of secretive public bodies that ought to be hanging their heads in shame. I’m proud to say that I was one of the bunch of people that helped bring this stinking plan crashing to [...]

  Posted on 25/09/07 | 2 comments | read on

• An interview about The Promised Land

  Vincent O’Donnell of Arts Alive, the Australian arts and culture radio station, was kind enough to track me down at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival last month for a chat about The Promised Land and how the book fits in with the Costa series (short answer: it doesn’t, it’s a standalone).
  As usual in Australia, it was [...]

  Posted on 24/09/07 | no comments | read on

• Autumn on the way

  I’ve been in this business long enough to recognise that US English and American English can, at times, be very different languages. Though it’s not widely appreciated, many Americanisms that raise a wince in some quarters in the UK are actually older versions of the English language, not modernisms at all. But there are oddities [...]

  Posted on 22/09/07 | no comments | read on

• FAQs about The Chopin Manuscript

  Seems I’m getting asked the same questions a lot about The Chopin Manuscript, the serial audio thriller to which I contributed a chapter alongside Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child and a host of others. I’ve put an FAQ on my website to cover the most common ones, but for the sake of convenience it’s reproduced below [...]

  Posted on 19/09/07 | no comments | read on

• Scrivener: it just gets better and better

  I wrote here back in August of how I’d moved my fiction writing to the wonderful and ridiculously inexpensive authors’ word processor Scrivener. But that was when I’d just completed the seventh Costa book, which was begun in Pages. Now I am starting from scratch, and determined to set up Scrivener to handle the task [...]

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• Pixmania: avoid at all costs

  A decade ago, when my fiction career was in its infancy, I was still working as a journalist to pay the bills. It was a cosy slot, covering technology for the Sunday Times through as weekly column. One of the many interesting aspects of the job was that I got to cover the birth of [...]

  Posted on 16/09/07 | no comments | read on

• The Chopin Manuscript… a unique thriller

  I hate sitting on things, and for the last few months I’ve been sitting on something very interesting indeed. Finally the news just broke today. I will give you more details shortly but if you want to get the quick scoop take a look here.
  A bunch of authors under the leadership of Jeffery Deaver and [...]

  Posted on 13/09/07 | no comments | read on