Swallows and Amazons Talking Books
The people who own the rights to make audio versions of the Arthur Ransome books can’t be bothered, despite the lucrative enough trade that exists selling to car-driving tourists in the Lake District. All the […]

The Silence of Flooded Houses
I discovered this little introduction to a book of Beatles lyrics, by Richard Brautigan.[…]

Sexy History
I’m reading Rubicon by Tom Holland, a pacy account of the corruption and collapse of the Roman republic in the first century BC. It’s a period I’m interested in because my own Roman studies started with Augustus, with t[…]

On the back wall of Rhodes & Mann there’s something which looks like a family tree. On closer inspection, it seems to be some kind of typology, lists of related things. A little list of love-related things, a little list of war-related thi[…]

No more decisive moments :(
Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004)[…]

How interested are artists in art? I would venture that a lot of them are not all that interested at all. After all, if you are constantly dragging round the galleries you won’t have time for your own work, and what about all those dangerous id[…]

Ned’s post below reminded me of a running pub conversation we’ve had over the past few weeks regarding the etymology of the word “wonk.” Fortunately I have my good friend google who offers some clues:
From here (big scroll dow[…]

Evil under the sun — I’ve been reading Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen for the past few days. Good read, not quite as well-written perhaps as the recent similar study of Hitler’s inner coterie The Devil’s Disci[…]

No way to run a comic: Al told me about this site at the weekend, it may have been linked here before but I don’t remember it. It’s an exhaustive (35 long pages) examination of the Spider-Man “Clone Saga” – the storyline[…]

As mentioned almost a year ago, probably my favourite artist is Ed Ruscha. But, until last weeked, I had never seen any in the flesh. I had survived pretty much on They Called Her Styrene by Phaidon and a few web covers. One of the appeals to me of t[…]