Tigers and Cockerels and Lobsters
I’m a big fan of Japanese arts, and I hadn’t been to the British Museum in a few months. I was disappointed that the regular Japanese room was closed, but there was something in one of the print rooms (4t[…]

A corollary about genre fiction (following from my Block-blog below): there are genre fans who are uninterested in the works admired by people who are more general fans of the medium, SF fans dismissive of Dick, Delany or Ballard and so on, for their[…]

Lawrence Block and the continuing unease of genre
Although it seems as if these days almost every literary commentator acknowledges that genre fiction can be as good as fiction in the literary mainstream, it’s just lip service. Nods are made to[…]

HOW CAN I NOT HAVE SEEN THIS ACTOR AGAIN?
In Howard Hawks’s mostly unoriginal (it’s almost a remix of Rio Bravo) but very fine 1967 western El Dorado, a teenaged girl shoots John Wayne early on, because she believes he is a hired gun who […]

Bridget Riley at Tate Britain: Size Does Matter
Some of the later work is rather limp, though I like some of her vertical/diagonal grid paintings, with colouring that may be on some scheme that I’ve not grasped yet, but is anyway sometimes comp[…]

He’s mostly forgotten now, but for mandatory plays of the wonderful I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday, and as the answer to the trivia question of whose was the first record played on Radio 1, but I think Roy Wood was a truly great pop star[…]