Anyway, I strongly recommend that you visit it. The details are here.

Meanwhile I’ve finally decided that the public should be allowed to share in the moment of musical glory I enjoyed in New York last year. Nigel Blows A Tune (written by Dave Sinclair of Caravan and included on their 1971 album In the Land of Grey and Pink) has always been one of my favourite tunes, and when Wesley Stace invited me not just to read but to perform some music at his Cabinet of Wonders show in March 2011, I tentatively suggested we do our own version. For the purposes of this show, Wesley works with a fantastic house band called The English UK, and they lost no time in learning the song and thrusting me in front of the audience armed only with a keyboard programmed to sound as close as possible to Caravan’s original Hammond organ. I can’t imagine that anyone knew exactly what to expect but the results were – well, not too embarrassing, I think, listening to it a year later. Judge for yourselves, in any case …

Nonetheless, I have not been entirely idle lately. Last year I wrote a short book for children called The Broken Mirror, and I’m pleased to say that it will be published by Feltrinelli, in a translation by Delfina Vezzoli, at the end of September this year. There will be ten full-colour illustrations by Chiara Coccorese, whose wonderful portrait of me I have linked to on this site before. No news of publication in other languages yet, but I hope to have some soon.

Meanwhile I am making good headway with a new novel, and hope to have it finished later this year.

Music continues to be an important inspiration. Lately I’ve been listening a lot to The Quickening, the latest album from a band called Remember Remember, who specialise in just the sort of tuneful, multi-layered instrumental music that I love. Most of all, though, I would recommend that you visit the Soundcloud page of the brilliant Louise Le May to check out her haunting voice and the exquisite melancholy of new songs like ‘A Tale Untold’ and ‘Angry Birds and Uncle Sam’.

A band called Colour Clouds have alerted me to a new song of theirs called ‘The Pier’s On Fire’, with some of the lyrics inspired (I think) by Michael Owen’s visit to Weston-super-Mare in the early chapters of What A Carve Up!. You can listen to the song here - it’s very good. I can hear a strong Smiths influence.

Finally, my heartfelt thanks to all the people who came to hear me speak in Switzerland and Italy last weekend. Vevey, on the shores of Lake Geneva, provided a splendid backdrop to my discussion with Josée Kamoun, who translates my books for Gallimard, and I was - as always - overwhelmed by the warmth and enthusiasm of the hundreds of Italian readers who came to meet me in Rome. These encounters are one of the things that give me the will to go on writing, and convince me that it must be worthwhile.

Jonathan has no public appearances scheduled at this time.

Please check back for more events - this page will be updated regularly.

This unique theatre piece has been written in collaboration with my friend Sean O’Hagan and his band The High Llamas: in many ways it’s the culmination of my experiments with combining music and the spoken word. This performance is part of the Notes and Letters festival - there is an amazing cast and I think it’s going to be the definitive version. Please come if you can - that last performance was in Spain more than eighteen months ago, and after this, who knows when we’ll get the chance to do it again!

For some reason I had not read Durgnat’s Hitchcock book before, and it is predictably brilliant, drawing the director’s disparate films together into intriguing groupings, finding unexpected thematic links between them. I turned to it after watching To Catch A Thief for the first time. I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to get around to seeing this film. I knew it was only meant to be a frothy, minor Hitchcock; but still, it comes from his greatest period, the mid-1950s, so I suspect that in a way I’d been holding it in reserve, deliberately holding off from watching it so that I had another of his films to look forward to. (I’m doing much the same thing with Rosamond Lehmann’s fourth novel The Weather in the Streets - still the only one I’ve never read.)

But then, something recently reminded me that there’s a whole treasure chest of other Hitchcock films waiting for me to discover: his films from the silent era. Of these, I’ve only seen The Lodger, one of his earliest thrillers (starring Ivor Novello) - and that was many years ago. One of the silents, The Mountain Eagle­, seems to have been irretrievably lost; some of the others are available on DVD, in one form or another. But the condition of the prints on many of these releases is ropey, to say the least.

Which is why I would urge everyone to have a look at this page on the website of the bfi, who are currently attempting to restore all nine of Hitchcock’s surviving silent films to pristine condition. I recently went to a presentation of their work so far, and the difference between the existing prints and the restorations-in-progress was indescribable. I think that when - and if - they are able to present these films on the big screen again, with specially-commissioned live scores, it will be a revelatory experience which will change our perception of this great director’s work forever. So please think about making a donation to their appeal if you can afford it.