My top by 10 William Boyd

My top 10

William Boyd

Author

See the full list

1 Ulysses (#3)

by James Joyce

2 In Search of Lost Time (#5)

by Marcel Proust

3 Emma (#13)

by Jane Austen

4 Pale Fire (#29)

by Vladimir Nabokov

5 Our Mutual Friend (#73)

by Charles Dickens

6 Scoop

by Evelyn Waugh

7 Mill on the Floss

by George Eliot

8 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (#19)

by Laurence Sterne

9 The Trial (#27)

by Franz Kafka

10 Wuthering Heights (#20)

by Emily Brontë

THE GUARDIAN

 

Michael Rosen in his studio in Wood Green, London.
Photograph: Karen Robinson

Michael Rosen wins Hans Christian Andersen award 

The former children’s laureate missed the announcement of the award in Bologna due to post-Brexit passport rule changes

Rosie Peters-McDonald

Tue 14 Apr 2026 

Michael Rosen, the poet and author known for books such as We’re Going on a Bear Hunt and Chocolate Cake, has won the 2026 Hans Christian Andersen award for writing in recognition of his lifelong contributions to children’s literature.

‘We were swimming in the mind pool of Tom Stoppard!’ – actors salute the great playwright

 

‘We were swimming in the mind pool of Tom Stoppard!’ – actors salute the great playwright

Rufus Sewell, Christine Baranski, Susan Wokoma, Toby Jones and Harriet Walter share their unforgettable encounters with a theatrical giant

Philip Larkin’s Photography

 

Philip Larkin / Courtesy of the estate of Philip Larkin

CULTURE

Philip Larkin’s Photography

Review: Richard Bradford, ‘The Importance of Elsewhere: Philip Larkin’s Photographs’

Aaron MacLean

November 20, 2015

In a poem he wrote in 1953 about perusing a photo album that belonged to Winifred Arnott—one of the many objects of his frequently anticlimactic erotic pursuits—Philip Larkin had this to say about the art of picture taking:

The Force of Circumstance by Somerset Maugham

 

The Force of Circumstance

by William Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham / La fuerza de las circunstancias

She was sitting on the verandah waiting for her husband to come in for luncheon. The Malay boy had drawn the blinds when the morning lost its freshness, but she had partly raised one of them so that she could look at the river. Under the breathless sun of mid-day it had the white pallor of death. A native was paddling along in a dug-out so small that it hardly showed above the surface of the water. The colours of the day were ashy and wan. They were but the various tones of the heat. (It was like an Eastern melody, in the minor key, which exacerbates the nerves by its ambiguous monotony; and the ear awaits impatiently a resolution, but waits in vain.) The cicadas sang their grating song with a frenzied energy; it was as continual and monotonous as the rustling of a brook over the stones; but on a sudden it was drowned by the loud singing of a bird, mellifluous and rich; and for an instant, with a catch at her heart, she thought of the English blackbird.

The Poet by Somerset Maugham

The Poet

by William Somerset Maugham

Somerset Maugham / El poeta

I am not much interested in the celebrated and I have never had patience with the passion that afflicts so many to shake hands with the great ones of the earth. 

P. & O. by William Somerset Maugham

P. & O.

by William Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham / Condenado a muerte

Mrs. Hamlyn lay on her long chair and lazily watched the passengers come along the gangway. The ship had reached Singapore in the night, and since dawn had been taking on cargo; the winches had been grinding away all day, but by now her ears were accustomed to their insistent clamour. She had lunched at the Europe, and for lack of anything better to do had driven in a rickshaw through the gay, multitudinous streets of the city. Singapore is the meeting-place of many races. The Malays, though natives of the soil, dwell uneasily in towns, and are few; and it is the Chinese, supple, alert and industrious, who throng the streets; the dark-skinned Tamils walk on their silent, naked feet, as though they were but brief sojourners in a strange land, but the Bengalis, sleek and prosperous, are easy in their surroundings, and self-assured; the sly and obsequious Japanese seem busy with pressing and secret affairs; and the English in their topees and white ducks, speeding past in motor-cars or at leisure in their rickshaws, wear a nonchalant and careless air. The rulers of these teeming peoples take their authority with a smiling unconcern. And now, tired and hot, Mrs. Hamlyn waited for the ship to set out again on her long journey across the Indian Ocean.

 

Jackie Collins

Sisterly Struggles of Jackie Collins

Filmmaker Laura Fairrie and the author’s daughter, Rory Green, on Lady Boss, which chronicles Jackie Collins’s remarkable rise—and her complicated relationship with her glamorous sister, Joan Collins.

BY JULIE MILLER

June 10, 2021

Jackie Collins was capital-F fabulous—arriving to Beverly Hills lunches in stretch limousines looking as glamorous as the characters in her romance novels.

“You think of her with that big, powerful image: the leopard print, the shoulder pads, the big hair,” says filmmaker Laura Fairrie, who profiles Collins in the documentary Lady Boss (premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival on Thursday). But Fairrie’s filmmaking quest was to crack that larger-than-life facade. “My immediate instinct was to try and look behind that, and find out what it was that made her write the books that she wrote. To look for that untold, private story. I had no idea that what I would find would stand in such brilliant contrast to the public persona.”