LONDON — Being a teenager in the unexciting London suburb of Luton in the 1980s was gruesome enough without the added complication of Pakistani parents who functioned as an in-house anti-fun squad. But for Sarfraz Manzoor, salvation came when he was 16, in the prosaic location of his high school common room.
LONDON — Lamb’s Conduit Street seems almost too adorable to be real, as if Ye Olde Fantasy Englande, the one that exists in your head, had suddenly sprung to life. But it feels exactly right that this cobblestone thoroughfare in Bloomsbury, filled as it is with idiosyncratic shops selling artisanal cheese and homemade cakes and other rarefied items, should also be home to Persephone Books, a gem of a place devoted mostly to overlooked works by female writers of the mid-20th century.
PASADENA, Calif. — There are many things that might attract a potential student to Yale, but the gloom of New Haven, Connecticut’s dead-of-winter aesthetic is not the first that springs to mind. Unless, perhaps, you come from California and you hate the sunshine and you are Leigh Bardugo, future fantasy novelist.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Although the purpose of this conversation is to promote her new novel, “The Dutch House,” Ann Patchett is in no great hurry to talk about herself.
(Books of The Times): A young woman sits alone in a cafe in Paris. How lucky she is, you might think if you happened past, to have her life ahead of her, to be free in this lovely spot in this most romantic of cities.
If she does seek another office, one document likely to draw close scrutiny is her book “Lead from the Outside,” which is part memoir, part self-help book (Its original title was “Minority Leader”).
There would be more dollhouses — ones she and her husband built and furnished for his granddaughters, and the now famous Pistner House, a 5 1/2-foot-high marvel of 18th-century French architecture.
There is “manoeuvre,” the British spelling of “maneuver,” for example, whose unpleasant extraneous vowels evoke the sound of “a cat coughing up a hairball,” Dreyer says.
Because this is a musical, the queen breaks into song. What is love, she wonders, considering the complicated example of her longtime marriage to the handsome but chilly Prince Philip, who has a wandering eye.
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