Can’t live without my books and my shoes. This is a lighthearted page about my obsessions. A sort of blog, I guess, except that I’m too busy to write anything more than about twice a year …

AUTUMN 2017

Incredibly busy summer: novel in proof, top secret screenwriting project underway, celebrating Jane Austen bicentenary and promoting new version of book on Austen, theatre and film … but at least I got a week in the sun at the end of August. More Austen on the beach, sort of – I’m reading Eligible …

SPRING 2017

I am currently reading the selected poems of Edna St Vincent Millay, a biography of Marlene Dietrich by Steven Bach, and the excellent Young Thomas Hardy by Robert Gittings. I am convinced that Hardy had a clothes fetish (women’s clothes in particular). One day, I want to write a book called Hardy’s Women. I have the opening in my head.

I’m (slowly) rereading the whole of Thomas Hardy starting with Far From the Madding Crowd. My husband bought me a beautiful leatherbound collection of Thomas Hardy’s Complete Works for Christmas…lucky me. Sadly, he didn’t love me enough to purchase Debo’s first edition privately printed copy of Brideshead Revisited–it only went for £52K…a snip…(tease).

On the shoe front, I decided that it was time to invest in a pair of gold strappy sandals…see below…

As Marilyn said: ‘Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world’.