Many years ago, when I was in my early to mid-teens, I was for a while addicted to the novels…
Brief note
I don’t really have the time or the mental wherewithall to say much about How To Live Safely In a…
Tiny tiny giants
Back in 2002, I produced a review-essay for The New York Review of Science Fiction that covered four novels by…
Memories
In an essay called ‘TBM and John’, collected in Scribble, Scribble, Scribble, Simon Schama makes a bold assertion: You always…
Attempt, endeavour, meditation
The essay is a European form, originating in the writings of Montesquieu and Bacon, but of late it has come…
Your Christmas Quiz
1: Why does ‘monosyllabic’ have five syllables? 2: How long is a sentence? 3: How many novels begin: ‘I’? Why?…
How do you read?
I’m a critic. It’s my job to praise or condemn books. But there are times when praise just gets in…
A Relative Century
I have just finished reading A Terrible Beauty by Peter Watson, a book I’ve been working my way slowly through…
Quartet
I Time present and time future are both surely expressions of time past. I first encountered T.S. Eliot as a…
Science in the Ghetto
I have, by pure coincidence, been re-reading Kate Wilhelm’s 1975 collection, The Infinity Box. I was reading the title story…