Category: Archive

First published, 17th April 2013 At least I’m going to start this month’s blog on a positive note but when I slide into the panic that comes, quite regularly these days – in the way it used to come to me as a child when I read or heard apocalyptic fables of the last tree…

First published, 25th June 2013 I want to write a sort of response to Michael Krüger’s remarks quoted in Publishing Perspectives this month. Soon to retire after forty five years at Carl Hanser Verlag, he laments: “I only know there are good and interesting books, and bad ones. You can read them on paper or on…

First published , 29th August 2013 “When men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.” ― David Hume When the impresario, Robert Newman invited Sir Henry Wood to conduct the first promenade concerts in London…

First published, 20th September 2013 Damien Hirst once said: “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say ‘f off’. But after a while you can get away…

First published, 30th December 2013 For over ten years Cairo has succeeded in drawing me back. These days I visit from Riyadh in the hope that I might reaffirm that I haven’t died and taken a squat in some weird supernatural pre-sin assessment waiting room. Not yet.  I’m going to start by asserting that Cairo…

First published, 31st January 2014 In January not one single skinny fly landed on my web. Two flies landed yesterday (2nd February). I couldn’t settle last night after flying in from London to Riyadh. I’ve been thinking of writing a novel about Saudi for ten years. Each year I edge a little closer to what…

First published, 4th March 2014 History is a novel without a future.  You know I rather despise the cheap tricks used in genre fiction to hook the reader, suspend the suspense, hang the cliff, as if all that matters is what comes next… I remember first reading Slaughterhouse-5. What hit me most was the way Vonnegut…

First published, 2nd May 2014 The universe is the mind in which we live. That’s all I could think of writing for this month’s blog and really, I didn’t much care to write that down either (or up, or do with it whatever one is supposed to do with words. Ideas). But I decided to…

First published, 5th December 2014 What you need, in order to win the Man Booker Prize is to win it. That may sound obvious or meaningless but it’s not. Okay, try this: what you need, in order to win the Turner Prize is to win it. See? It works there too. To understand how and,…

First published, 9th January 2015 In November 2011, soon after the fire bombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices, Time Paris bureau chief, Bruce Crumley wrote a diatribe against Charlie Hebdo. Crumley began: Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant,…