Over the last five or six years I’ve become obsessed with post-war British history. It started as part of an…
Mr Turner
I had a theory about Joseph Mallord William Turner. At an exhibition of his work at the Tate some years…
Intro and Outro
There are writers who seem to fall through the net, who somehow miss out on the audience they deserve. They…
Inverse of distraction
At the very moment the book is dematerializing, it is becoming more embodied than ever, the book celebrating the fetishization…
common place
:::: Learning to travel is another way of saying learning to read. (37) :::: For five months at the beginning…
100
And so we start the celebrations, commemorations, what have you, for the 100th anniversary of the First World War. We…
At Home
In the conclusion to his immense tome, The Culture of the Europeans, Donald Sassoon has one of those brief apercus that…
Victor Holmes
Shortly before Christmas, Maureen and I saw the two versions of the National Theatre production of Frankenstein. In the first…
A paragraph about a paragraph I love
There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way…
Unheimlich?
According to Freud, one of the key characteristics of the Uncanny is the doppelganger. In which case, Eleanor Catton’s marvellous…