Monthly Archives: June 2009

This public building dedicated to literature in London has statues of Bacon and Spenser on its frontage, but no Shakespeare that I can see. Where is it?

Hadley Freeman in the Guardian leads the postmodern liberal backlash (despite her protestations to the contrary) saying that ‘Bruno’ is about homophobia, not making fun of difference. Unfortunately, she entirely misses the point, which is that its target audience (admitted by Universal and Baron-Cohen) is teen males, who don’t and won’t see through the gross […]

In 1946, George Orwell wrote an entertaining essay entitled ‘Books V Cigarettes’, in which he totted up the cost of both and came down firmly on the side of books. After setting out to buy socks today and returning with books instead, I’d like to present a further argument to that. One has to take […]

I’ve just added a new page (right) giving brief outlines of my short fiction, which you can use to see if you’d like to film a short story. The list should also help you to find that missing story with the dodgy plot-point you’ve wanted to complain to me about. Writers love that. We also […]

I know I’ve been banging on about Jeff Hawkes for a long time (see ‘London’) but this picture of the Greenwich Peninsular is spectacular. Find it on his site in a nice hi-res screensaver….

I spotted these two on my travels last week; there are still tickets available for the first event, but don’t take anything from the bread shop with you.

Is there any other part of London that moves about so much? I knew Lenin lived here and it was a large London constituency, but where is it? Well, it used to be around Roseberry Avenue (near Sadler’s Wells) but it’s now near Holborn, except that Finsbury Circus and Finsbury Square are separate and Finsbury […]

My other half won’t watch old movies, as if their age somehow invalidates them, but I love ’em. The great noir thrillers often clocked in at around 65 minutes, but boy, they packed in wit, ingenuity, bad attitude and style. In most horror or crime films the criminals know they’re guilty, but in a noir […]

I hate the next two weeks. They come around every year, and I dread them. This is when we realise how far North we live. Maybe its my melatonin levels, but I’m kind of like a farmer; I sleep when it’s dark and wake when it’s light. So for the next two weeks, the sun […]

The ever-vigilant Ian Alexander Martin of Atomic Fez Publishing sends me this excellent lo-fi vid ‘Her Morning Elegance’ by Oren Lavie, and it makes a perfect accompaniment to the animated Post-It note video that was going around a short while ago.