The Closed Circle by Jonathon Coe
Jonathon Coe’s The Rotter’s Club (published 2001) was always intended to be Book 1 of a larger story, and Book 2, The Closed Circle has only recently come out. It is a page-turner no doubt (I read it ver[…]

Inhabitants fled in panic.: “We were so happy when we heard we had escaped an alien invasion.”[…]

LIES AND THE LYING LIARS ETC.
NEWS FEED: Bono says U2 have deal with fans. Two crap albums and they are out.
Surely they have reneged on this deal then. Back in 1981 when they released October. Take this to the High Courts now, a deal is a deal.
In o[…]

Its hard to do a picture thread without a picture, but as my Bread and Butter pudding was a companion to Chris’s squirrel I feel I need to post it. But a picture would say everything, when I turned up after a gnarly and damp journey I presented[…]

Good[…]

BLOCK BLOG
1: Sins Of The Father
Well if Dan can do all the Dr Who books in order, a quick trawl through Lawrence Block’s ouvre should not be past me. In particular, the Matt Scudder books. This will be a short set of tails spilt into three. On[…]

THE STAR WARS TRILOGY DVD SET
You might have heard of this. My thoughts on the original version of Star Wars are here and talking about the films themselves in detail I’m in two minds of, but I think not this time. So instead, some brief refl[…]

INSIDE THE GESTAPO
by Helene Moszkiewiez
PIRATE QUEEN
by Judith Cook
The books aren’t related, I picked the first one because, well, that’s a pretty good if direct title, while the second had a nice psuedo-map cover that I usually fall fo[…]

What I miss about chart countdowns — a random mention of Air Supply over on ILM today got me to thinking about the last time I was thinking about them at all, which would have been 1983 or so. I was about two years into realizing there was a To[…]

Procol Harum
Those who know me reasonably well wouldn’t expect me to like this lot – there is almost nothing one might classify as psychedelic or prog that I do like. But they were the first band I ever saw live (well, discounting support[…]