God or, more correctly, G-d opened the Book of Life on Wednesday, the first day of Rosh Hoshanah, and will be snapping it shut again next Friday, September 13. During these ten Days of Awe, he’s going to be watching you, taking notes and making a decision about your coming year. You have [...]

Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle putting the sex into P&P It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is [...]

Bilbo Baggins first wriggled his furry little toes  just down the road from here. So I often think of that notoriously shy scholar John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and his vast imagination after I’ve dropped my children off at school, when I walk (or currently crutch) past his old house. The [...]

Bela Lugosi as … Lilith? 1816: they called it the summer there was no summer. In the Swiss Alps, the cold was bitter even in June. Huddled under the stormy cloak cast by the unseasonable weather, a band of young  English travellers passed the time with talking, fantasising, [...]

Gadgets, car chases, kiss kiss, bang, bang. Was there ever a deeper examination of the modern condition than James Bond? Just kidding. A Bond film is about wallowing in style over substance, stuff over emotions, materialism over spirituality. Ian Fleming: debonair For this country, of course, [...]

You’re nothing but a pack of cards. One of the cleverest and most enchanting heroines in all literature was born on a sultry afternoon 160 years ago on the banks of the River Isis right here in Oxford. It was the 4th of July, 1862. Charles Dodgson rowed up the river with his friend the [...]

Most self-help books have about three ideas in them which are padded out with a lot of white space and bullet points. But there are a few which are absolutely brilliant. Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way has sold about a gazillion copies in the two decades not because it’s [...]

In my last post I pointed out that the extraordinarily brilliant writer Patricia Highsmith had dark, disturbing Lilith conjunct her Mercury, the planet of mind and writing. One of the things that makes her writing so remarkable is her ability to get under the skin of evil. Her greatest [...]

Joan Crawford. picture by George Hurrell Lilith – baby-strangler, seducer, mistress of secret knowledge, outsider, feminist icon — Black Moon. In Jewish folklore, she is Adam’s first wife. But her roots are much older – an Assyrian she-demon, a serpent goddess, queen of the underworld. [...]

This cover was designed by Len Deighton in the late 50s. If Jack Kerouac had not drunk himself to death at the age of 47, he would have turned 90 on March 12 this year. He was in many ways the perfect Pisces author – a drunken, dreaming mystic visionary who seemed to just spew out his […]

I still get a small thrill when I walk past number 20 Northmoor Road after dropping my kids off at school. Half a century ago, JRR Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings in that unprepossessing suburban house. I’ve often wondered if there were [...]

There is something very cool about Agatha Christie even as a child. Could it be Virgo Sun, Virgo Rsing and Saturn in Virgo Many years ago, I moved from  working in (weekly) magazine publishing to editing books. It was truly a move from Gemini-land to Virgo-land. The magazines were all about [...]

  JK Rowling – imagination, talent and wit. She’s the first person to make a billion by writing books. She’s ignited the imaginations of about a gazillion children on every continent. She’s managed to make a Virgo cool – well, sort of. For those of you who [...]