Over the weekend, I was lucky enough to have dinner chez Rachael Kendrick, blogger and cook extraordinaire. (I’ve also interviewed her for the Killings podcast, which you can find here.) We were chatting about her varied extracurricular activities – I feel like I can say ‘extracurricular’ about an academic – one of which is powerlifting. As she showed us her favourite powerlifting shirts (neither, sadly, was made of lycra), one of the other dinner guests professed himself astounded by the exotic range of activities Kendrick did in her spare time.

Although we were talking about hobbies (perhaps the favourite word of second-language teachers), the conversation reminded me of one of my favourite author bios I’ve read lately – that of Arthur Phillips, author of The Song is You, The Egyptologist and Angelica. It begins:

Arthur Phillips was born in Minneapolis and educated at Harvard. He has been a child actor, a jazz musician, a speechwriter, a dismally failed entrepreneur, and a five-time Jeopardy! champion. Read more