The story in today’s Independent on manga is pretty telling about what the author thinks of “comics for girls”. Quote: “The [typical] manga reader was a man, and he probably liked SF and he could be a student. But then they decided, let’s s[…]

Introduction
Several years ago I did a thing on Freaky Trigger called “Thousand“: this involved playing through the 1,000 MP3s I’d collected at that point – a very small number it seems now – and writing about them in re[…]

I remember the Baader-Meinhof trial. I do. I was only five but I remember it being on the ITN news (you know the one with the jaunty jingle that was on after Blue Peter gave up the ghost on the BBC). I remember it because I also remember a wet Sunday[…]

A bunch of FT writers and close associates have NEW BLOGS (or bloglike entities) which demand some of your attention: (more…)[…]

“Am I allowed to swear?” Estelle is back in London after a European tour, and the deafening Indigo2 soundsystem is determined to help her mark out her territory from the off. She is decked out in an eye-watering sequinned dress (which wor[…]

With Rubicon and Persian Fire, Tom Holland proved himself a master of narrative history with a sizeable weakness for relating the ancient world to the modern. His third history blockbuster, Millennium, dials back the parallels but finds its narrative[…]

I’m sure there’ll be a lot about Woolies on various blogs today: time here simply to note its role in the early 00s pop boom. For some value of “boom”: the singles market in the time just before downloads was a) tiny and b) do[…]

In which the somewhat feeble journalist, coasting on past “not exactly glories”, goes undercover on the next series of Strictly Come Dancing. Unfortunately not being au fait with the current scandal on Strictly he does not realise that pr[…]

There are two great, if not stone cold classic, aspects to Oliver Stone’s W. Put aside the fact that Stone has somehow managed to wander back from the wilderness of his own self-indulgence and succeed in making entertaining a film no-one really wan[…]

Henri Bergson, in his 1901 essay Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, says that all comedy can be boiled down to noticing mechanical behavior in something living. Laughter is an acknowledgement and reminder to ourselves (and others) to be […]