The Festival Experience
November 3, 2022
Doris Lessing sits on stage at Cheltenham’s Everyman Theatre, straight-backed, steel-grey hair tied back in a bun, the epitome of a serene English woman – though she was born in Iran. There is something godlike about Lessing, a sense she sees everythin …
My most treasured moments as a writer
September 9, 2022
It’s been a whirlwind but hugely enjoyable 24 hours and I am glad to get on a train at Manchester Piccadilly. Yesterday afternoon, shaking snow from our coats, my wife and I checked into a hotel at Salford Quays. And, this morning, I represented Queen …
The writers who inspire me
July 7, 2022
The Zodiac Bookshop was in a non-descript suburban parade of shops. It was run by a man whose glasses were on a chain around his neck and who, when he peered over them at a customer, never, at least in my memory, cracked the slightest smile. It did not …
Why I write
April 4, 2022
The reason I write, first and foremost, is to earn money and to pay my electricity bill. I realise how fortunate I am to be able to do this – in 2018, the average writer in the UK earnt just £10,500 – and I also realise how precarious such a life is, w …
Letter to my younger self
January 13, 2022
I picture you at a particular time and a particular place. The time is 1983. The place is Pasadena, just north of Los Angeles. You are at the California Institute of Technology pursuing a PhD. But your heart is not in it… Read on
Pi in the Sky (And Other Places)
November 23, 2021
Pi (π) is the mathematical symbol used to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Or, alternatively, it is how many diameters fit around the pe- riphery of a circle. For at least 4,000 years, people have wondered about the …
A photograph comes to light
November 11, 2021
2016: I am writing about a nineteen-year-old Indian man who, in 1930, is sitting in a deckchair on a ship travelling through the Suez Canal. Anxiety at what he will find at his destination in England is far from his mind as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar t …
Why does the Universe exist?
August 23, 2021
Back in the plague year of 1665-1666, Isaac Newton changed the scientific world, discovering the universal law of gravity and the mathematics of calculus. Now, in the plague year of 2020-2021, is history about to repeat itself? Stephen Wolfram thinks s …
My interview with Carlo Rovelli
March 29, 2021
My interactions with my surroundings define me. I do not exist in any meaningful sense independently of those interactions. Air molecules are bouncing off the atoms of my skin, photons of light are being absorbed by atoms in my eye, compressions and ra …
Why does nature do things in threes?
March 31, 2021
The beauty of Lego is that an infinite variety of things can be built by simply combining a finite number of basic building bricks. But say one day the Lego corporation launched a version of its bricks in which each was hundreds of times bigger than it …