Monthly Archives: August 2019

It’s been a week of such depressing news that I can’t even refer to the weather as glorious because it’s part of the global emergency. So let’s have a song from Pogo that will make you feel warm inside. (That’s Pogo’s logo.) Part of the fun with Pogo is guessing all the movie samples. This […]

With the high streets in trouble and shopping malls not always proving to be as exciting as we’d hoped, corporations are punting around for ways of making it interesting to shop again. London’s vast King’s Cross Coal Drops project (ie. fancy mall) is in the press for the wrong reasons. This POPS (Privately Owned Public Space) […]

What’s that? You don’t remember Favourite Soundtracks 1, 2 and 3? Just run a search and you’ll find this was a series I started in 2015 and then…just forgot about. Film scores have always interested me because they ameliorate narrative. Some composers overpower visuals (John Williams, Michael Nyman), others are too generic (sign of a […]

Some more answers to your questions, starting with one from yesterday’s comments (and another cheesy shot of me at some thing). Where is the best place to steal ideas from and get away with it? Film, book, TV, radio or a particular source/place/author. The answer may infuriate you. When I’m working on the main drafts […]

I love good public Q&As, and with the peak book and film seasons coming up in the not too distant future, I’ll be booking myself in for as many Q&A events as possible. They’re best when the questions are original and the answers aren’t rote. Here are a few of the questions I’ve been asked […]

Lily Tomlin once said, ‘New York is always knowing where your wallet is.’ It’s true of all big cities, and longtime residents tend to stay out of trouble not just because of what they know but how they look and which areas they wander into. When a couple I know recently visited from Australia for […]

Writers suffer different levels of public amnesia. Chase’s name sounds familiar to many who have forgotten his books, perhaps because it distantly exists in the public memory, and there’s a reason; Chase became synonymous with a certain kind of disreputable crime novel, yet he was born in the Edwardian era. Why, then, did we associate […]

As we now know, with the full acceptance of the internet came a great unshackling of information and inevitably, the rise of disinformation that gave us Russian meddling, whistleblowers, Cambridge Analytica and several disastrously compromised leadership contests. The latest heroes to be turned into villains are social media influencers, upon whom advertisers pounced because they […]

When a man reaches a certain age his thoughts turn to military history. I’m not sure why this happens. Just as a number of my female friends are venturing into books on crystal healing and Ayurvedic forest yoga, so their husbands are reading about forgotten battles or attending the Biggin Hill Air Show. Maybe it’s […]

  Monty Python understood a key national trait. The British don’t hate. We dislike, we are annoyed, or we Don’t Care Terribly Much For This Sort Of Thing. We rather like silly. But thanks to a set of algorithms that placed a tiny number of confused questionnaire-answerers into the grasping hands of an even tinier […]