Tag Archives: Anyone’s Game – my latest novel

Antonio Tabucchi’s novel of pessmism and measured hope set in Fascist Portugal

Posted on February 6, 2016 by

Pereira Maintains, by the late Italian writer Alexander Trocchi, is a minature masterpiece. It is as satisfying in its form as it is morally, and contemporary literature doesn’t offer so many chances to say this. A smash success in Italy … Continue reading →

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Scotland’s Relationship with England: is marriage the right metaphor?

Posted on May 20, 2013 by

My knowledge of Scotland is confined to a couple of cross-country visits nearly twenty years ago, and some imaginings for my most recent novel, Anyone’s Game. On one actual visit to the west coast I concluded the food and the … Continue reading →

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Anyone’s Game depicts Brave New Russia

Posted on December 5, 2012 by

I certainly had Huxley’s novel in mind when I was writing the Moscow chapter of Anyone’s Game.  As I wrote in my first blog on these pages, in September 2012, novelists tend to have other novels in mind when they … Continue reading →

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A Modernist Woman

Posted on November 4, 2012 by

Alexander Archipenko (1887-1964) is for me the artist who invented Modernist Woman. This fabulous image is taken from his sketchbooks c.1920. What’s the difference between a modern woman and a Modernist woman? See the protagonist of my novel Anyone’s Game. … Continue reading →

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A Russian Madame Bovary in Scotland?

Posted on November 4, 2012 by

Any woman novelist who writes about adultery has to hate Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. The French writer’s novel of 1859 is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century realism, but its attitude to ‘the fallen woman’ as used to be said is contemptuous. Lydia … Continue reading →

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A Woman in the World of The Thirty-Nine Steps

Posted on September 30, 2012 by

Happily Sophie Asmus, a woman not made for a part in John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), didn’t stay in Constantinople long in my novel Anyone’s Game. If she overlapped with Buchanesque figures on the Bosphorus that was because it … Continue reading →

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Like Tin Cans Tied to a Tricycle

Posted on September 29, 2012 by

The quote is from a review by Adam Mars-Jones of Michael Cunningham’s novel By Nightfall. You can find the reference in this autumn’s edition of The Author, the journal of The Society of Authors. The critic wasn’t happy about too … Continue reading →

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