I just started reading Visual Arts In The Twentieth Century by the always good Edward Lucie-Smith. The jacket blurb includes this as one of three bulleted points highlighting this books special features (the others are analysis by decade, and informa[…]

Not that I see myself as some sort of purely cerebral literary analyst at any time, but sometimes a book resonates so much with your current mood that, for better or worse, you struggle for anything resembling a tiny shred of objectivity. I hated thi[…]

1. Clothes. I’m a middle aged man who pays less attention to clothes than just about anyone: but I have never seen so many unappealing looking old people at any gig. The audience was 100% white, as far as I can tell, maybe 80% male, with lots o[…]

Unless the search is failing me, I haven’t reviewed anything by him here before. He’s a writer I love, another of that breed of crime writers who isn’t up to much if what you want is a mystery with clues that you can try to solve al[…]

Warning: explicit content. In case the title wasn’t a clue.
I saw an ad for a Channel 5 show about plastic surgery the other day, and it seemed to think it was a surprise revelation that big breasts are popular in porn. I know that we aren&#821[…]

This isn’t about judgements of quality: I just wanted to mention what is surely the soloest album of all time, Boulders by Roy Wood, the great man behind The Move, Wizzard and the only Electric Light Orchestra track I like, ‘10538 Overtur[…]

This strikes me as a superb example of bookmaking. The book is taller by about 50% than my next largest books (other large art books, their maximum normal size), but narrow. If you stood the two biggest hardback novels you own, one on top of the othe[…]

I reviewed brother Gilbert’s Palomar volume a while back, and I’ve just read this: a 700-page collection of all Jaime’s Maggie-related strips from Love & Rockets. And I’m struggling with what I want to say.
I adore the fi[…]

TV Diary: Why?
This wasn’t just a way of padding Do You See over the slow Bank Holiday weekend. I had been thinking about how most of the TV items here (and there aren’t enough) aren’t so dissimilar to the movie reviews. Nothing wro[…]

TV Diary: everything I watched on 30/3/05
England vs. Azerbaijan: The usual coverage. An absurdly one-sided game, finishing 2-0. Pundits claim it’s the highest chance to goals ration for one team ever. We won, and I don’t care too much ab[…]