Well it wouldn’t be an alphabet of crap if the Beatles did not make the cut. PS I Love You comes from the stage of their career when they were not being feted as the single most important cultural event of the twentieth century. The beginning o[…]

I was trying to work out what it was about Elf that reminded me of Ghostbusters. I loved Ghostbusters as a kid, and really rather like Elf. Perhaps it is the slightly fantasy setting of both films. The fact that both are firmly rooted in a vision of […]

Take a journey back in time
Leave the western world behind
Cross the mountains to Peking
Where the paper laterns gently swing
Leaving aside the fact that the Chinese prefer Beijing these days since Level 42 wish us to travel back in time, has there e[…]

Cheery Van Morrison.
The harder edged Cocteau Twins Songs.
The Farms Greatest Hits.
British Hip-Hop.
All phrases and concepts which make no sense I think you would all agree. Oxymorons even. And in British Hip-Hop nothing puts the morons in Oxymoron […]

I’m sure most rock stars were better when they were dorks, but luckily for them we don’t usually get to see that. With Depeche it was all terribly public, and I can’t think why anyone with the vaguest affection for their gauche Goth[…]

SEND FOR THE HATING TABLETS! My annual battle with misogyny gets underway with the release of this year’s Lambrini adverts. You know the form by now: three women enjoying ‘girly night out/in’ with bottle of stomach-wrenching pear pl[…]

I have a slim vol on my bookshelf called Genes, People and Language by a fellow called Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza. Using genetic tests, one can draw trees which show how early man spread around the globe. Using linguistics, one can plot very similar t[…]

KATE RYAN – “Libertine”
Sometimes the English Channel seems wider than ever. In France a libertine seems to mean “smouldering pop princess with a great line in trancey synth riffs”. In England it means “junkie with[…]

Particle Physics Explained – this also talks about infinity!!
The best contender at the moment is String Theory- which has as the basic unit of physical reality a string vibrating in 9 dimensions.
As you know, the length of any piece of string[…]

My interest in old adventure fiction continues to grow with a rediscovery of a pile of John Buchan books I’d been given for Christmas years ago and turned my nose up at. I thought I’d kick off with The Thirty-Nine Steps, but I couldn&#821[…]