Andrew O’Hagan: Friendly fire

I have tea with Andrew O’Hagan one morning at his house in Primrose Hill. We start talking about Seamus Heaney, a great friend of O’Hagan’s who died two years ago. I ask if he misses Heaney.

“Oh, every day. He had this brilliant tendency to take you under his wing, to be concerned about you in a very local way. He didn’t make friends with writers in order to pay attention to their reputations, or read reviews of their books, or to figure them in some higher or lesser constellation. He was interested in you humanly: he was a good person to have around if you had a cold. 

Pixi + Caroline Hirons Double Cleanse

We’ve been fans of the Pixi Glow Tonic for a few years now so we always take an interest when they develop a new product. The Double Cleanse they brought out earlier this year really made us sit up and pay attention as it has been developed by the hugely popular beauty blogger Caroline Hirons in conjunction with Pixi. Hirons certainly seems to know her stuff (it was Hirons who told us an exfoliating tonic should be run across the lips as well as the rest of the face to get rid of dead skin, for example, and we’ve not looked back on that score.)

Visit Farley Farm House – home of Lee Miller

Lee Miller was one of the most fascinating, and beautiful, women of the 20th century. After starting her career as a fashion model, she worked (and had an affair with) with Man Ray before becoming an acclaimed war photographer and one of the first people to photograph the concentration camp at Dachau when it was liberated. After this, she married Roland Penrose — the Surrealist and co-founder of the ICA — and retired to live at Farley Farm House in Sussex.

Miss Jane by Brad Watson

Brad Watson’s second novel is both charming and disquieting. The Miss Jane of the title is a baby born with a genital birth defect which Watson reveals by degrees. Notions of how anatomy constitutes identity might now seem modish, but Watson sets his novel in rural Mississippi during the early twentieth century and was inspired by the real-life example of his great-aunt, who died in 1975. This historical setting is crucial: the defect, which the reader can gradually piece together as being persistent cloaca, could now be operated on, but Watson is interested in exploring how a woman isolated by this abnormality could learn to live.

Top 10 best places for solo dining in London

While most of us wouldn’t think twice about going for a coffee alone or being a solo diner in a café at lunchtime, eating your evening meal in a restaurant alone is a different matter.

Eating a solitary dinner out is mainly about confidence. 

If you feel self-assured enough, you’ll probably be happy eating alone at the Chiltern Firehouse on a Friday night. There are some dining spots, however, that go out of their way to make the single diner feel more comfortable and at home when flying solo.

Julie Myerson: Seeing the bad stuff

The Stopped Heart is Julie Myerson’s ninth novel (she has also written one novella and four works of non-fiction). It may just be her best book yet as it manages to be both a page-turning thriller and a serious exploration of how abuse works. If that sounds off-putting, it shouldn’t be – whilst her subject matter is child abduction and murder both now and in the Victorian era, she is at pains not to titillate her readers.