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Mary Curies

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Review of Tracy Chevalier’s treatment of Mary Canning’s life, in Remarkable Creatures. — For Perspective

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged audiobooks, Bishop Usher, British Association for the Advancement of Science, Bullock's Egyptian Hall, Deshan Tennekoon, Dickens, Dissenters, Dorset, Elizabeth Philpot, film, Geological Society, history, International Women's Day, John Fowles, Lyme Regis, Mary Anning, men, Oxford University, palaeontology, Perspective, poverty, religion, Saxony, science, the Bible | Comments (0)

Eerie-Ness

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Review of Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood’s poem/song/story/play on where past and present meet at Orford Ness. — For Perspective magazine

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged audiobooks, Hugh Brunt, landscape, Max Porter, music, non-fiction, Orford Ness, Penguin, Perspective, Poetry, Radiohead, Robert Macfarlane, Scarfolk, Stanley Donwood, Stephen Dillane, Suffolk, the Falklands, war | Comments (0)

So Goode it’s bad

Friday, December 10, 2021

Forever and a Day: a James Bond novel by Anthony Horowitz (Random House Audiobooks, read by Matthew Goode, 7hrs 36mins) . Around the final Daniel Craig installment, there’s been inevitable talk of who should be the next James Bond. Well, I’ll tell you who it shouldn’t be, and that’s Matthew Goode. Three years ago, Anthony […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Anthony Horowitz, audiobooks, Britain, cars, CIA, Corsica, food, French, German, Ian Fleming, James Bond, languages, Matthew Goode, McDonald's, MI6, Norway, Radio 3, Random House, Russians, Scots, wine, women, WW2 | Comments (0)

Living in a ghost town

Sunday, March 8, 2020

Ten years ago, I wrote the world’s first review of Chinaman, for the Sri Lankan Sunday Times. Last week, I interviewed Shehan Karunatilaka at the launch of his new novel, Chats with the Dead, at Barefoot Gallery. Here are the (brutally-abbreviated) highlights of those proceedings. — For The Sunday Times (SL)

Filed in interview, Journalism | Also tagged Barefoot, books, Shehan Karunatilaka, Sri Lanka, Sunday Times (SL) | Comments (0)

Selassie come home

Thursday, February 6, 2020

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste Canongate, £16.99, pp. 428 . In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years before. Initially largely uncontested – thanks both to emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Abysinnia, Adwa, Andy McNab, Canongate, death, dragons, Ethiopia, gas, Haile Selassie, history, Homer, Italians, Maaza Mengiste, Mussolini, photography, sex, the Bible, the Derg, The Spectator, Verdi, war, women, WW2 | Comments (0)

M.O.’s m.o. – or; Everybody wants to be like Mike

Thursday, June 7, 2018

A review of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. — For The Spectator

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged crime, ethnography, Florence, geography, intelligence, Libya, London, memory, Michael Ondaatje, spies. Aramaic, St Lucia, The Spectator, the Thames, Trieste, writers, writing, WW2 | Comments (0)

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Monday, February 19, 2018

. In China the dials of a clock turn round instead of the hands. — The Nelson Evening Mail, September 8 1908 . Benedict Cumberbatch reads Oryx magazine. A piece of pasta (dry) weighs essentially one gram. A man can only care about so many things. Labels are for clothes. In Bosnian there are no words for […]

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Also tagged Benedict Cumberbatch, Bosnian, brothers, China, clothing, cows, Darryl Gerrity, death, Dmitri Kabalevsky, Englishmen, film, friends, grapes, Hawaii, health, horology, Islam, love, magazines, measurements, men, music, Nelson Evening Mail, non-fiction, pasta, pornography, Qatar Airways, Reading, religion, Russians, Virginia, white goods | Comments (2)

Feats of Klay

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Redeployment By Phil Klay (Canongate, 291pp, £15) ‘Nobody wants to do a year in Iraq’, mutters one of the narrators in Phil Klay’s Redeployment, ‘and come back with nothing but stories about the soft-serve ice-cream machine at the embassy cafeteria.’ No kidding. And Klay (rhymes with ‘guy’) will not have been the first soldier, American […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Iraq, Jesuits, Literary Review, literature, MFA, Phil Klay, sex, short stories, US Marines, war | Comments (2)