Arthur grew up reading everything he could find, in the unselective and slightly indiscriminate way children read before anyone teaches them to have taste. He studied literature and cultural history, mostly because he couldn't think of anything else he wanted to study more, and spent several years writing privately — notebooks, unfinished drafts, essays nobody but him ever read — before publishing anything at all.
His writing eventually settled around the questions that kept returning on their own, without being invited: memory, relationships, faith, identity, and the strange, ordinary questions that show up uninvited in an otherwise unremarkable week. He is based in London, where he has lived for most of his adult life, in flats that have gradually accumulated more books than furniture.
“Writing was the one place I could keep asking the same question until I understood what I actually believed.”
He writes essays, occasional poetry, and a good deal of material that never leaves the notebook. He is not especially interested in being well known. He is interested, almost to a fault, in getting a sentence to say the exact thing he means, which turns out to be a much larger project than it sounds.