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Kreises of conscience

Saturday, August 21, 2021

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner Canongate, £16.99, pp576 . In 1928, modest young blue-collar English lecturer Mildred Fish arrives in Berlin to begin her PhD in American Literature. In the febrile, polyglot atmosphere at the […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Adolf Hitler, America, Berlin, biography, Canongate, capitalism, Communism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, France, Goethe, Great Britain, history, Hjalmar Schacht, Jews, John Dos Passos, Joseph Goebbels, Lufthansa, Mildred Harnack, non-fiction, Operation Barbarossa, Operation Walkyrie, Plötzensee Prison, propaganda, Rebecca Donner, Rebecca West, spies, Stalin, the Soviet Union, The Spectator, Theodore Dreiser, trench coats, Winsconsin, WW2 | Comments (0)

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Monday, July 6, 2020

. Only six percent. of all paper produced is used for making books. — The Nelson Evening Mail, Monday, February 18 1907 . The Bombay Harmonium Company are neither from Bombay nor do they manufacture or stock harmoniums. Thor Heyerdahl was right. Only 38% of Netflix content is available outside the US. Penguins can shoot […]

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Also tagged America, anthropology, Ayn Rand, Bombay, books, Carlsberg, Denver, food, harmoniums, Hungary, London, money, Nelson Evening Mail, Netflix, news, paper, Patrick Harrington, penguins, pigeons, Ringo Starr, satire, shit, tea, Thor Heyerdahl, Venezuela, Venice, yoga | Comments (0)

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Monday, May 22, 2017

. There are more fragrant white flowers than of any other colour. — The Nelson Evening Mail, July 13 1908 . The inhabitants of Ipswich are the least passionate in the UK, having sex on average only 18 times per annum. Gazelles are quite amenable to snuff. Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich was a fully-trained football referee and […]

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Also tagged Aberystwyth, Americans, anatomy, children, Déodat-Guy-Sylvain-Tancrède Gratet de Dolomieu, drink, eBay, film, football, gazelles, Great Portland Street, Ipswich, James IV, Jesse James, languages, mineralogy, Nelson Evening Mail, obscenity, Scotland, sex, Shostakovich, tennis, the Bible, the French, tobacco, UK, wives, writing | Comments (1)

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Monday, February 6, 2017

. The telephone has a tendency to render the girl operators left-eared. — The Nelson Evening Mail, July 4 1908 . Eight wickets for eight runs is the worst batting collapse in Twenty20 international cricket. St Blaise is the patron saint of sore throats, and of knitting. Estonian literature suffers from a dearth of stories […]

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Also tagged Chaucer, Chrysippus, cricket, drink, driving, Estonia, health, history, humour, information, Japan, knitting, law, Mount Rushmore, Nelson Evening Mail, Nixon, novels, phones, politics, Samuel Derrick, science, Secret Service, sex, Shakespeare, St Blaise, statuary, toilets, tramps, turnips | Comments (0)

Intellectual MOT

Sunday, October 16, 2016

Some thoughts on the enquiring mind, slang, and judging a book by its cover – in correspondence with Tia Goonaratna. — For The Sunday Leader

Filed in interview, Journalism | Also tagged Angela Carter, books, Christopher Hitchens, Churchill, dictionaries, history, intellectuals, Mongols, Peter Frankopan, slang, Sri Lanka, The Sunday Leader, Tia Goonaratna, Waterstone's | Comments (0)

Flak Jacket to Dust Jacket

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Men at War: What Fiction Tells Us About Conflict, from The Iliad to Catch-22 By Christopher Coker (Hurst 325pp £25) My Life as a Foreign Country By Brian Turner (Jonathan Cape 240pp £16.99) Seamus Heaney once remarked upon the heroes of antiquity that it is ‘not so much their procedures on the page which are […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged America, Brian Turner, Christopher Coker, film, Homer, Iraq, Literary Review, London School of Economics, memoir, Poetry, Russell Crowe, Seamus Heaney, Vietnam, war | Comments (0)

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 fiction, Iraq, Jesuits, Literary Review, MFA, Phil Klay, sex, short stories, US Marines, war | Comments (2)

Found

Monday, December 2, 2013

3 times in the Literary Review (October edition): ‘cunts’ – or variant thereof.* What do I win?

Filed in Poetry | Also tagged Literary Review, magazines, October, sex, wordsearch | Comments (0)

Golding the lily

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Review of Arena’s The Dreams of William Golding. — For theartsdesk

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged education, JG Ballard, John Carey, John Gray, Nigel Williams, Nobel Prize for Literature, religion, theartsdesk, TV, William Golding | Comments (0)

theASHtray, vol.7

Saturday, March 17, 2012

From the arts desk at the end of the universe, reflections on Douglas Adams, Erwin Schrödinger, Joseph Kony, YouTube, Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry, Bilbo Baggins, Saul Zaentz, trademark and copyright law, Lewis Hyde, Amy Winehouse, Florence Welch, Queens of the Stone Age, MUSE, Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgård, and the many and various meanings of Liff. […]

Filed in column, Journalism | Also tagged Africa, Amy Winehouse, Bilbo Baggins, comedy, Douglas Adams, Erwin Schrödinger, film, Florence Welch, Ian McKellen, Joseph Kony, law, Lewis Hyde, MUSE, music, Pierce Brosnan, Queens of the Stone Age, Saul Zaentz, Spotify, Stellan Skarsgård, Stephen Fry, theartsdesk, YouTube | Comments (0)