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Monthly Archives: January 2012

Shooty-shooty-shouty-shouty (and a little bit of FHM)

Reviewing Channel 5 on patrol in Royal Marines: Mission Afghanistan. — For theartsdesk

After Wood (after Sebald)

… and it was here, while re-reading an article by the American critic James Wood on the oneiric nature of the writings of ‘Max’ Sebald, that I found myself impressed more and more by the feeling that it was in fact Wood himself who had at least once previously caused me to look up the […]

Apartheid: my part in its downfall

Review of BBC Four’s The World Against Apartheid (1/5). — For theartsdesk

Things, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have said to my girlfriend

# 34 I’m just saying, I kind of need a better offer if I’m not going to carry on reading my book…

Saturday night

Saturday night at the local Premier Inn. ‘Coffee: FREE refills’

Dialogue

– If you seriously expect me to stand here and listen while you say the things I know you’re going to say and you say the things you know I disagree with… well, then, you’re going to be gutted.

Poetry

emboldens the life that is already there like a glass of red wine but also sometimes like the hangover the morning after.

Hades

In H&M a black shop-assistant carts flaxen-haired dummies downstairs.

Middle-distant memory

of queuing outside the toilets with Roger McGough, talking about why we hate rap.

Same, same

I buy books on Africa the same way my mother buys books on Ireland. (I don’t read them the same way.)