WE HAVE been out of town for the past three days, and there's something about taking time away from work that's refreshing. When we returned home yesterday evening, I was ready to get to work, fresh from a break from routine. The time away also made me think about my home office set-up⏤things that are working and things that could be improved, and so I searched around for some inspiration.
If you suspect that 21st-century technology has broken your brain, it will be reassuring to know that attention spans have never been what they used to be. Even the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger was worried about new technologies degrading his ability to focus. Sometime during the 1st century CE, he complained that ‘The multitude of books is a distraction’. This concern reappeared again and again over the next millennia. By the 12th century, the Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi saw himself living in a new age of distraction thanks to the technology of print: ‘The reason people today read sloppily is that there are a great many printed texts.’ And in 14th-century Italy, the scholar and poet Petrarch made even stronger claims about the effects of accumulating books ....
Balmoral Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, was Queen Elizabeth’s preferred resort among her several castles and palaces, and in the opening pages of “Spare” (Random House), the much anticipated, luridly leaked, and compellingly artful autobiography of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, its environs are intimately described.
If you’ve ever emerged from the shower or returned from walking your dog with a clever idea or a solution to a problem you’d been struggling with, it may not be a fluke. Rather than constantly grinding away at a problem or desperately seeking a flash of inspiration, research from the last 15 years suggests that people may be more likely to have creative breakthroughs or epiphanies when they’re doing a habitual task that doesn’t require much thought—an activity in which you’re basically on autopilot.
During one of my more desperate phases as a young novelist, I began to question whether I should actually be writing my own stories. I was deeply uninterested at the time in anything that resembled a plot, but I acknowledged that if I wanted to attain any sort of literary success I would need to tell a story that had a distinct beginning, middle, and end.
In January 2021, 18 months after a sticky divorce, I bought a house. I bought it partly because I could – my ex-wife and I had got lucky on the property ladder and walked away with enough money for a deposit each. But also, I bought it because I was desperate. With shared custody of our two-year-old daughter, I needed a place where she could be happy and where I could get back on my feet.
WAS READING an article about 7 great but notoriously hard-to-finish books and realised that I'd started most of them, but actually did finish one them⏤Thomas Piketty's 2013 masterpiece, Capital in the Twenty-First Century⏤all 600 pages of it, and enjoyed it so much that I'd considered picking up his follow-up while at Waterstones recently. Last week we introduced new candles at The Shop and we had no idea that they would be so wildly popular so soon after launch. Today, two new scents have arrived, just in time for upcoming festivities: Cranberry and Chestnut ...
THIS INSTALMENT OF 10 IMAGES features snapshots from Kyiv, Ukraine by Nastia Poberezhna. There are glimpses of her home, the door open to the terrace; a bouquet of bright pink roses against a raindrop-covered car window, a blurry glimpse of the city just beyond. There are hard boiled eggs and Saint Laurent coffee cups, pizza and peonies and the everyday moments of a life...
HAD FORGOTTEN to mention that a couple of weeks ago, we saw the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. It was a bit crazy, a little hard to follow at times, manic and funny and perhaps worth it if only for the wildly romantic line, "...I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you."
HOW IS YOUR long weekend going? It's an official bank holiday here in England, so some things are still closed and there are no parcel deliveries, which means that everything we've been expecting will have to wait until at least tomorrow or later. The weather was perfect! Warm and springlike, sunny and filled with cherry blossoms and the last of the daffodils ...
RATHER THAN sit around watching the terrible progression of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and waiting for the awful news that seems all but inevitable, we're keeping ourselves busy with work as the distraction of choice. It's also made us realise that we've haven't had a chance to visit any places in Eastern Europe yet, despite the fact one of our writers was from Ukraine...
IT'S THE FIRST of March after a long winter and the sun is streaming through the windows. The brighter mornings and longer days are calling us outdoors, even as we type away at our keyboards. The sounds of cars driving by, people rushing along to shops and appointments, and it feels like a new beginning ...
IT HAS BEEN amazingly blustery for the past two days and nights, the beginning of two separate storms set to hit England this weekend, we're told, so the desire to stay in and avoid being blown away has been strong this week. To encapsulate the vibe that is this time of year, we've created a moodboard for cosy February days ...
THIS INSTALMENT OF 10 IMAGES features the quietly chic photos of Juliane Diesner (@styleshiver) There are coffees in Parisian restaurants and velvet chairs in pools of light, drinks on the beach, a ride on the Orient Express, and plates of spaghetti alle vongole. The photos are strangely nostalgic, evocative of times gone by ...
Albanian-born Ilirida Krasniqi is a dentist by day, and a style influencer when work is over. Based in Copenhagen, she has already caught the eye of Vogue Paris one to follow for her ability to capture the energy of the moment. We love her decidedly lady-like style: high-waisted trousers with crisp white shirts, belted trenches and tweed blazers, mules and kitten heels and strappy sandals...
