Monthly Archives: December 2009

I hope you like the new layout. Designer Simon Moore is still making tweaks, but I hope you’ll find much more information here now. I’ve added drop-down menus along the top of the page, making everything easier to navigate. Meanwhile, take a look at this if you haven’t already seen it. It’s called Architectural Projection […]

Enough now. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point in my lifetime Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ turned from a nice 66 page story about the spirit of Christmas into a gigantic ‘beloved classic’ industry. Worse still, it turned into a brand. Now, I love it as much as anyone else (give me […]

The 76 year-old Pulitzer Prize-winner Cormac Mcarthy is flogging off his old Olivetti. This mysterious device apparently used to be known as a ‘typewriter’ and requires no batteries or electricity to operate, yet it has produced five million words, many of them in sequences that can break your heart. What powers this extraordinary device? A […]

While the rest of Europe lights up like, well, a Christmas tree, with the Eiffel Tower glittering from top to toe and the Madrid streets each themed with different modernist sparkles, the theme of London’s Regent Street lights this year is ‘Use The Lights From Last Year’. Oxford Circus has opted for ‘Let Disney pay […]

Living in Hollywood wasn’t fun – in fact, it was the most miserable period of my life. Sometimes you’d visit a place and think ‘Oh, that was in a movie’, but for some peculiar reason it was never as exciting as when I saw the chariot statues in Madrid this weekend and recalled this scene […]

I recently attended a balloon debate in which I had to promote a favourite short story in order to stay in an imagined rapidly deflating balloon, and just came across the notes I made for the case of HG Wells’ story ‘The Door In The Wall’ being voted to remain in. I won the debate, […]

It’s with great shock that I learned the fantasy writer Robert Holdstock had suddenly died of an E-Coli infection at just 61 years of age. There are many good authors who are dreadful people, but Robert was a wonderfully life-affirming person and a magnificent writer, whose ‘Mythago Wood’ will shine in the annuls of great […]

It’s been puzzling me ever since the posters went up (in August!) – where have I seen that face before? Now, after watching politician Peter Mandelson talking about his rubbish broadcasting bill, the pieces come together and we see how Jim Carrey achieved his dead-eyed, soulless appearance…and why Tiny Tim was left to die after […]