I read the Bond books aged roughly 10-14, starting with Diamonds are Forever, which was the only one in my parents’ house. This was also the first film I saw — birthday outing, my 11th birthday: three schoolfriends and me plus mum, who lied b[…]

He’s got licences to kill, he’s got licenses to fish! But what was Sam Mendes’s *real* wish for James Bond in SPECTRE? An intrepid band of your FT correspondents stumbled upon an early draft of the screenplay last night, while diggi[…]

There is a new James Bond film out, and so I emailed a select cadre* of FT writers to tell me their favourite a) BOND FILMS and b) BOND THEMES. The idea then being that I would write about these things. But a problem arose! It turns out that the only[…]

This is another one of my ‘listening exercises’ – in a world of enormous musical choice, I find games like these are a good way of structuring what I hear, and avoiding the temptation of falling back on a relative handful of default[…]

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THE FADE OUT Vol 1 (Image Comics. Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips/Elizabeth Breitweiser)
SATELLITE SAM Vol 2: Satellite Sam And The Kinescope Snuff (Image Comics. Matt Fraction/Howard Chaykin)
One of the nice things […]

“It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the Election.” – Margaret Thatcher, 4 May 1979
“The biggest horror is that the whole […]

I’ll let you set the paaaace…. what? Only eight new number ones? Well, we’re not trying that again.
In order, best to worst. The usual caveats apply: don’t expect this to be much of a prediction of final verdicts when I event[…]

This is a reprint from my Tumblr, from a meme where people asked for album reviews. This was for Very, by the Pet Shop Boys (and Bilingual too, as it turns out).
I got an anon asking about Bilingual too, so I’m going to consider them together as th[…]

On Friday I went to the first day of Mark Sinker’s Underground/Overground conference, about the British music press from 1968-1985 – dates that spanned the rise of the underground press, its colonisation of the music papers, and the besieging[…]

1978: The Shooting Star
It’s the spider I remember. In The Shooting Star, boy reporter Tintin is investigating an apocalyptic threat, a star on a collision course with our world. He visits an observatory, hoping they can tell him what’s going on.[…]