News
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The Zattere: A Walk from San Basilio to the Punta della Dogana
Forget the crowds in San Marco and Rialto. There’s a lovely walk you can make to escape them along a broad promenade with beautiful views and piles of history. This is the Zattere which runs along the Giudecca Canal from San Basilio to the famous viewpoint at the very tip of the Grand Canal. It’s…
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The Ghosts of Campo Santa Margherita
When I first came to Campo Santa Margherita thirty years ago, there were just a couple of bars and restaurants and the place was dead by nine o’clock. Today it’s one of the busiest patches of nightlife in Venice, thronged with students and spritz-drinkers until the small hours. But its religious past is still there,…
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To write books you need to read books
The publishing business likes to focus more on the positive than the negative. So here’s a truth you hear rather too rarely. Agents everywhere are drowning in unsolicited manuscripts from hopeful writers that are so bad they make the poor souls who receive them want to weep. Not bad in the sense that they’re sub-standard.…
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Why writers shouldn’t give up on AI
I’ve never been terribly interested in flavours of the month. AI being one of them. None of us can avoid AI, of course. If you’ve searched for something on Google you’re using it already. There are things about it I hate, naturally. The idea of using technology to create actual scenes of a book is…