ok i haven’t read an agatha christie since i wz about ten so i have embarked on an ODYSSEY OF MIDDLECLASS CRIME, working my way through the new christie “by decades” collections — which means i began with THE SECRET ADVERSARY […]

Important BASH STREET KIDS news (following up on yesterday’s Lollards): it’s sadly too late – both in closing date and in age of readers terms – for FT staff to enter Blue Peter’s competition to “create a new Bash […]

Major development for Captain America (for now, anyway). Cap – strangely for such an “iconic” creation – is probably the character who has changed the most, tonally, in my comics reading lifetime. This latest event seems pitc[…]

norton died in 2005, aged 93, with a LOT of titles to her name — my reread entirely took in books i read aged i wd say 10-12
my interest was slightly piqued by fellow lollard TRACER HAND, who lent me THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN (ed.Drake/Flint[…]

(or “heterogenous ideas yok’d by violence together” as dr sourpuss johnson had it)
item #1: GOURMET PRINGLES[…]

i watched two eps of the 4400 last night: not much to report except a. they are wasting summer glau and b. SCARY BABY
T and I very much enjoyed SCARY BABY — as a device it is basically i. the er ULTIMATE VALIDATION OF SOVIET MONTAGE THEORY and […]

Unusually for a big event, there is actually an awful lot to say about Marvel’s Civil War series, the last issue of which hits UK shops today. I’m not going to say an awful lot in this post: basically, as a comic it was kind of rub, as a […]

Much like those eminently satisfying reports of wine experts preferring £4 Sainsbury’s plonk in a blind taste test, Gramophone magazine finds that an obscure pianist who built a cult following on the back of an astonishing variety of accomplis[…]

“[John Thelwall] also had the misfortune to be a mediocre poet — a crime which, although it is committed around us every day — historians and critics cannot forgive.” —E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class*
It was ca[…]

One of the top reads on the interwebs lately has been The Diary Of Ralph Dibny, even though it’s completely incomprehensible if you’re not a comics fan who’s been reading DC’s 52 series. The conceit of the comic is that it tel[…]