“The moss on a dead man’s skull“: isn’t this just most evocative phrase? On the whole the doortstep-weight Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in 16th- and 17th-Century England (Keith Thomas, 1971, Pe[…]

So Mark Haddon wins the Whitbread Prize for The Curious Incidence Of The Dog In the Night. Deserved? I think so. In a year where publishing sensations seem to pop out of the woodwork every couple of months, this is the one whichI was actually moved t[…]

wolfgang tillmans–for when i am week i’m strong.
his photographs seem almost accidental, i have this catalog beside me from a mid90s show at Kunstmusuem in Wohlberg, and when i try to explain the photos they seem so ordinary. But they mo[…]

Don Quixote and Picasso
Not many people I know have read Don Quixote. At least not all of it. Or even any of it. The thousand odd pages of dense text can appear rather daunting. It’s also a novel with an odd structure and the second half tips a[…]

When is a novel not a novel? When it is actually a loosely connected set of short stories, or novellas. Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Only In London uses this trick, hoping that the resonances between her three tales will add more than the sum of its parts[…]

I went to see Elizabeth Price‘s new show (it’s at the Jerwood Space in sunny South London) during my lunch hour. It was perfect: much of her work involves a painstakingly producing low-impact items: ‘Boulder’ is a huge, smooth[…]

Fantasy Reader: titled with admirable honesty this is a blog run by somebody who reads fantasy books and then writes about them. It’s a neglected genre (justly in some ways?) so it’s interesting to see the enthusiast’s own perspecti[…]

The sex addiction bit I can handle. The potential second coming of Christ plot, though old hat, has been a staple of my reading over the last twenty years (so much so that the worst excesses of my own juvenilia written at sixteen was a second coming […]

I LOVE YOU, YOU BIG DUMMY
Val’rie Belin’s photographs often seem to be about death, such as the empty dresses in coffin-like boxes, Miss Haversham’s ghost gone AWOL. But what if death is replaced with a simple lack of life? The unti[…]

It’s published by Routledge, it cites Derrida, Foucault and Barthes, it’s about British Theatre – more specifically John Osborne – so all in all this is a shoo-in to be hated by me (I like D, F and B, but on the whole I hate a[…]