“Hi I am Red Skelton, exceptionally annoying star of the 40’s and 50’s – trust me there was no comic turn I could flatten, or subtle humour I couldn’t mug into submission. Named Red due to my bright red hair often showcased […]

“Hello readers! It’s me, last year’s winner, Missy Elliott! Although 2016 has been an eventful year, I definitely hadn’t forgotten about my triumphant song at all. Definitely not. And neither had the good folk at Freaky Trigge[…]

Hurrah – the Pub Crawl is now old enough to join the Army!
To celebrate this milestone I thought on the 29th December this year we should go on a route which several milestones can be seen, and also have a metaphorical expeditionary force, a fo[…]

2. Spitfire And The Troubleshooters #1 (Brown/Morelli/Conway/Trimpe/Sinnott/Morgan/Roussos)
The New Universe was intended to be more ‘realistic’ than the main Marvel line – “the world outside your window” as the early editorials put it. In[…]

This is a blog about failure. Thirty years ago, Marvel Comics celebrated its 25th Anniversary by launching a “New Universe” – a start-up line of all-original comics, designed to… well, that depends who you ask. In theory, the New Universe was[…]

It seemed appropriate to return to writing with a piece about the refurbed (although that’s an understatement) Fitzroy Tavern and my continuing love/hate relationship with Sam Smiths. Huge swathes of the pub writing on FT is about Sam Smiths b[…]

Exhumed again, the ‘hauntography’ series, exploring the stories of M.R.James one by one! Read the original story, or read more about the series.
“All magic — I repeat, ALL magic, with no exceptions whatsoever — depends on the control of dem[…]

UPDATE: the book is funded, so thanks everyone that helped. It is due for delivery in a little over a year. I will keep people up to speed on developments via the kickstarter page, which has a blog.
EXACTLY two hours left as I post, and it suddenly[…]

So last May, as some FT readers will recall, I ran a conference at Birkbeck about the politics of UK music-writing from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, its roots and discontents, its early evolution and its latent potential, as I put it here back then. T[…]

Six days ago I was about to do an EMP talk and I saw rumours about Prince on Twitter. I thought for a second about what I would do if I had to break the news that Prince had died to a room of women and men who loved him. Only for a second, because th[…]