The picture books I used to read with my children were long ago packed away in boxes and consigned to the attic.  In a home filled with books, some of the best-loved stories – of bears and gorillas, adventures on the moon and in faraway lands – are no longer on view.  Even so, with a little effort, it’s easy to remember them, the books that taught my kids to read, dream, and imagine.

It’s been a long time since I read a picture book, but I recently won an assortment of books in a fundraising raffle that included Peter Sís’s The Wall.  It’s a wonderful book and worthy of the many prizes it received, but by no means is it a book exclusively for kids.  It tells the story of the author’s upbringing behind the Iron Curtain, in post-war Czechoslovakia, and recounts what it was like to live during the Prague Spring before the Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing everything in their path in 1968.  Through a series of intricate drawings, predominantly grey to emphasize the colorlessness of life under a totalitarian regime, Sís conveys brilliantly the constraints, the monotony, and the miserable uniformity, lightened only by occasional glimpses of the symbols of Western freedom: blue jeans, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys.

This novel, by Thomas Mogford, irritated me so frequently that I almost did something I almost never do: toss it aside before completing it.  I didn’t, but that says more about my persistence or stubbornness than it does about the book.  The problem is the writing: the plodding, lifeless prose, the abundance of clichés, the sheer triteness of it all.  OK, I get it.   No one picks up a detective novel and expects great writing, right?  Well, to use a well-worn phrase that Mr. Mogford would probably be unable to resist, I beg to differ.  There are plenty of novelists working in the genre who write beautifully.  Benjamin Black, for example, or Susan Hill, or the incomparable John Le Carré.  Here, even the plot, the ingredient that rescues most mystery fiction, was dull and predictable. Sleeping Dogs did something so few books do.  Something unforgivable.  It wasted my time.

The teachers in my Catholic boarding school in England, believing that “the devil finds work for idle hands”, liked to fill the schoolboys’ every waking hour with useful activity.  Twice a week we had “reading periods”.  The entire grade would gather in a large room for an hour and we would be allowed to read whatever books we chose from the school library, as long as they were appropriately high-minded.  The sessions were held mostly in silence, but the French teacher always provided classical music in the background.   His tastes were narrow, conservative, but impeccable, and it was in these classes that I first listened to the work of composers such as Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn.  Later, in university, I bought a turntable and started to collect vinyl records.

Deutsche Grammophon was perhaps the leading label of the day, and the Berlin Philharmonic, led by the imperious and impossibly glamorous Herbert von Karajan, was its star.  I tried to collect as much of the orchestra’s work as I could afford.  For a time, the sound of orchestral music was inseparable for me from the sound of the Berlin Philharmonic.  I longed to hear them perform live.  Going to Berlin wasn’t a realistic prospect in those days, so I was determined to get my hands on a ticket during one of the orchestra’s rare visits to London.  It must have been 1987 or 1988 at the Royal Festival Hall, an all-Brahms program, conducted by my hero, von Karajan.  I remember the orchestra playing in casual clothes that evening, their concert tails having been misplaced by the airline.  I was spellbound the whole concert, by the sight of von Karajan and the sound of his orchestra.

Fast forward 30 years and I find, to my amazement, that I haven’t been to a Berlin Phil concert since that unforgettable evening in London in the 1980s.   All the more amazing given that I’ve been a regular visitor to Berlin throughout those years. Time to correct that and time for a new milestone – a visit to the orchestra’s home, the Philharmonie.  I recently bought a ticket for a concert performance of Tosca under the baton of maestro Simon Rattle.  It was a wonderful evening of gorgeous music.  Was it as memorable as the London concert?  Ask me in 30 years.

A great bookshop feels curated.  As you wander around, browsing the shelves and table-tops, you sense a presiding influence and intelligence.  This is no random collection of books, thrown together haphazardly.  There’s a force behind it: a discerning, discriminating, opinionated mind.  This is a community bookshop.  Not a community defined by place, but a community of interest with a clear-sighted taste-maker in charge.  You sense some explicit bloody-mindedness.  “If you don’t like what we stock, turn around and walk out”.

do you read me?! is the archetypal curated bookshop.  It can be found in a pretty part of Berlin-Mitte.  Its neighbors are the small galleries and coffee shops you find all over the quiet, charming streets near St. Hedwig’s hospital and the old Jewish cemetery.  I was wandering around and exploring the area, so it was pure happenstance that I discovered the store. It’s a place with a clear focus, though not necessarily one that’s easy to put into words.  It covers the many intersections where design, fashion, architecture, and politics meet.  Force me to summarize its inventory and I’d say “contemporary culture” (with a decidedly European twist).  As you might expect, it’s heavy on small-circulation, independent magazines and journals.  Books are less prominent, but I uncovered a few gems I can’t imagine finding in more mainstream bookshops, and came away with a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Circa 1900.

Some cities get bookshops that capture and encapsulate them perfectly at a particular moment in time.  Berlin, with its counter-cultural, forward-looking, and confident energy has do you read me?!

Measuring the population of the world’s largest cities is a complicated and somewhat competitive business.  Whatever method you prefer, at 24 million people Shanghai gets close to the top of everyone’s list.  Getting an impression of such a huge place in a short time isn’t easy.  I recently spoke at a conference in Shanghai (my first time there) and had the opportunity to spend a little more than a day checking out the city.

My first proper look was an early morning, bird’s-eye view when I opened the curtains in my 56th floor room at Le Royal Meridien.  I looked down on the Huangpu river as it twisted through a forest of skyscrapers that stretched as far as I could see.  A few of the buildings – the Shanghai Tower (the tallest in China) and the World Financial Centre, for example – stood out from an otherwise undistinguished mass of tall buildings.  Later in the day, walking along the Bund, I was able to see some of the beautiful historical buildings that grew up at the turn of the 20th century when this was the financial powerhouse of east Asia.

However glossy the center of Shanghai might be, with its hundreds of brand-name stores lining Nanjing Road, within a block or two you can find small and surprisingly quiet streets with tiny shops selling a mass of merchandise.  A little further afield is the French Concession, a residential and retail area set up in the 1840s that’s now very popular with visitors, housing small artisans’ stores and cafés in areas such as Tianzifang.  I ended my day’s stroll in the Jade Buddha Temple,  Most recently established in 1928, it’s a compound of buildings that houses numerous devotional statues, including two beautiful white jade Buddhas brought from Burma.

I’ve visited a few other cities in China: Beijing, Wuhan, Hangzhou, and Nanjing.  Shanghai seemed to me, on the basis of my brief stay, one of the most interesting and distinctive.  Also one of the most paradoxical: bustling yet often calm, huge but occasionally intimate, modern and historic.  If an opportunity arises for a longer visit, I’m certainly going to take it.

Here’s something I never thought I would say.  I’m starting to like Beijing.  I’ve been visiting once or twice a year for the past decade, usually staying a few days on each occasion, but I never formed much of a connection with the city.  I have to be honest – it has always struck me as a peculiarly featureless place, and the choking pollution and the horrible traffic haven’t helped much.

So, what’s changed?  Well, the weather for one thing. On my most recent visit, a warm sun shone every day in a bright blue sky and there was barely a trace of the smog that normally covers the city.  The lilac and cherry trees were heavy with blossom, brightening streets that previously seemed dull.  It’s hard to overstate what a difference these things made.  Beijing felt somehow washed or re-painted, making familiar places such as the Forbidden City look different.  Mutianyu, a section of The Great Wall that I’ve visited several times, was especially transformed.  As I walked along the wall with my family, it was possible to see distant stretches invisible on previous visits and get a glimpse of the extraordinary scale of the place.  Flowering cherry trees close to the wall made it even more picturesque.

Beijing will never be one of my favorite cities, but I’m going to try to be more even-handed about it in the future.  Go in the springtime and check the weather forecast – that’s my advice.

When they gave the Costa Book Award 2016 to Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End, the judges described it perfectly.  “A miracle of a book – both epic and intimate – that manages to create spaces for love and safety in the noise and chaos of history“.

The novel is narrated by Thomas McNulty, an Irish-born immigrant, who enlists to fight in the Indian Wars and again in the Civil War on the Union side.  His tale is of conflict and peace, of savagery, suffering, and tenderness, of hatred and love.  Love most particularly for a fellow soldier, John Cole, and the Native American daughter they adopt and raise together.

In these times when America is so divided, uncertain, and suspicious, Days Without End is a piercing reminder of what millions of unnamed immigrants sacrificed for the country, what they gave, what they lost, and what they destroyed in the endless task of building and renewing America. It also reclaims for gay men a place in the past from which conventional history-telling has erased their memory.  It’s a novel of unusual beauty and power, a shocking depiction of war and the experience of soldiers, and filled with tenderness found in the least likely of places and circumstances.  Somewhat surprisingly, it’s also very funny in parts.  It’s simply one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time.

When e-books and e-readers started to become popular, many commentators in the publishing industry were making predictions about the imminent demise of printed books, claims that even at the time seemed silly and extravagant.  Ten or more years on, sales of e-books have flattened, printed books are prospering, and the pundits are hoping the rest of us have forgotten their silliness.

The affection readers feel for “traditional” books isn’t especially difficult to understand.  Books can be beautiful objects, and today it’s easier to find gorgeous examples of the craft than at any time in history.  Book jackets are a big part of the appeal.  You don’t have to be a true bibliophile – the aficionado looking for the perfect harmony of paper, binding, and typeface – to appreciate a beautiful book jacket and recognize what it adds to the experience of reading.  Here are a few of my personal favorites.

I’ve often wondered what influence authors have on the covers of their own books and what they think about the end result.  Jhumpa Lahiri, celebrated novelist and short story writer, has written a delightful account of her own complicated relationship with book covers in an essay published by Bloomsbury, The Clothing of Books.  She’s wonderfully direct about the subject:

“The right cover is like a beautiful coat, elegant and warm, wrapping my words as they travel through the world, on their way to keep an appointment with my readers. The wrong cover is cumbersome, suffocating.  Or it is like a too-light sweater: inadequate.  A good cover is flattering.  I feel myself listened to, understood.  A bad cover is like an enemy; I find it hateful”.

This is a lovely, revealing, and surprisingly personal essay.  It deserves to be read, not just by bibliophiles or fans of Jhumpa Lahiri, but by everyone stubbornly faithful to printed books, those incomparable and perfect devices for delivering truth and beauty of all kinds.

Like most Londoners, I tend to take for granted the architectural treasures of my native city.  I’ve become a little less blasé since I moved overseas more than ten years ago, but not much.  Recently I was lucky enough to be invited to a private dinner in the Banqueting Hall, and I defy even the most hard-bitten and hard-to-impress of my fellow Londoners to be unmoved by the extraordinary beauty and historical richness of this room.

Perhaps its chief glory is the ceiling painted by Rubens in 1636.  I sat in the Hall, trying to imagine King Charles I being led through one of its windows facing Whitehall and onto the scaffold where he was beheaded on January 30th, 1649.  I sat next to an English historian over dinner who told me that the king, on that bitterly cold morning more than 350 years ago, requested an additional shirt in case the crowd gathered for the execution might see him tremble and mistake it for fear.

It was thrilling to spend time in that beautiful room.  I felt very fortunate, jolted out of my complacency, and reminded yet again how wonderful London can be.

I wrote about Howard Hodgkin here last year.  I was saddened to read yesterday the news of his death at the age of 84.  I used to see him quite frequently some fifteen years ago at a café in Museum Street in London, close to his studio.  On the first occasion, I recognized him and pretended not to.  Many well-known people have finely-tuned antennae for such things and I could tell he was grateful to be left alone and enjoy his coffee.  After a few such “sightings” over several weeks, he finally came and sat at my table and struck up a conversation.  Then, and on many subsequent occasions, we talked for a few minutes over our coffees.  I don’t remember our conversations, except one about India, a place he loved and visited often. I saw him one final time, last year in New York, at the opening of one of his shows.  He was in a wheelchair.  I shook his hand.

We never broke the silent conspiracy.  I knew who he was.  He knew I knew.  We both pretended not to know. At the time, that seemed the right thing to do.  Yesterday, reading of his death, I wished for a moment that I’d told him how beautiful his pictures were.