"Maigret at Picratt's" by Georges Simenon (published by Penguin Books)

Simenon lets it all hang out

06 May 2019 - 10.05 AM

Georges Simenon is ready to write another novel. He's roughed out the first chapter in his head and is therefore set to go. He sharpens a lot of pencils, puts a pile of writing paper on his desk, fills a few pipes with tobacco and hangs his "Do Not Disturb" sign on the study door. He'll start writing at 6-6.30am each day and will put in 12 hours or so producing up to 80 pages. After that first chapter, the story will go wherever his head takes it. Three, four, five days, perhaps even a week of such toil will pass and the new Simenon book will be complete. The world awaits.

Imagine no ‘Imagine’

There is “Imagine” the song, recorded by John Lennon in May 1971 and which, almost ever since, is…

15 October 2018 - 08.10 AM

Criminally satisfying

This is one of the most intriguing of the 30 or so “Maigret” books that we have read: a man calls on…

27 August 2018 - 08.08 AM

More than beer and sausages

Germany gave the world the word schadenfreude, and some parts of the world were happy to throw it…

16 August 2018 - 08.08 AM

The story of a book

One of the less obvious tourist sites in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is the former house…

30 July 2018 - 08.07 AM

Where impossibilities seem commonplace

Walking down a city street in India one day (it may have been Bombay and it may have been 1973; so…

25 July 2018 - 09.07 AM

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