RIP Jonathan Raban

A brief appreciation of Jonathan Raban, upon his death.

2022: Another year in reading (as in books, not the town near Slough)

Middlemarch – despite predictably squealing ‘Nooooooo, don’t do it’ as Dorothea Brooke settled on the notion that the ridiculously dusty Casaubon would make the perfect husband, and then, experiencing similar stomach-pit lurchings when Lydgate started making eyes at Rosamond Vincy, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Advice to the poet from a five-hour drunk

In which I attempt to mine the gap between what’s thought and what’s spoken, in a cider fuelled conversation about poetry.

The world’s first psychic, intuitive, walking guide…

What if your average numbered walking guide, turned out to do much more – going beyond the basic geography to be predictive, intuitive, even psychic? If that happened, it might go something like this…

Imagine that there was a CheckaTrade for writers…

Imagine a world where there was a demand for poems to be repaired, plot holes to be fixed, unnecessary exposition removed, unfinished tales completed, or lost books and stories to be patched-up and rewritten. The literary equivalent of MyBuilder; let’s call it, Your writer.

word gnats

A Veritable Bewilderment of Delights

I’ve always quite liked the style of old handbills: the erratic punctuation, jumbled type sizes and overuse of exclamation marks especially. If I produced a handbill for this blog, it would look something like this…

Dream dapples, Pied-beams and Tantalights

As the beam touches you, it has a near instant effect, quickly drawing your thoughts out through the window and filling you with a desire to be out there, on the other side of the glass, walking in the sunlight, exploring the city streets, or escaping over the horizon, (I like to think of this particular effect as a positive variety of Corpse-light or Willow-the-wisp, but without the danger of being drawn into some terrible dark and boggy end).

Balham enters the Anthropocene

At the inaugural Balham Literary Festival, a gathering of Nature Writers, Landscape Writers and Writer writers came together to discuss the state of the natural world. Here’s my report on what I saw and heard.

A time for shelf analysis: New Year reading resolutions

It’s dark. It’s raining. January is upon us and the season of reflection, projection and resolve is underway. For voracious readers, this means that the perennial question: what to read next will be nagging at their shoulders more urgently than ever.

Common Ground or Private Park: Whose Nature (writing) is it anyway?

This post originally began as a rant about ‘gatekeeping’ in so-called ‘New Nature Writing’. Since then, I’ve tightened it up a little, and updated some of the links, esp. re lack of diversity in nature writing, creeping nativism and more.

Ten Books

I was recently nominated by a friend on Facebook to post a list of the 10 books that had made the most impact on me. It was a lot harder than I thought and I’ve had to miss out some real favourites. I could have written ten lists, let alone ten titles, featuring almost entirely…

Walking into history: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts

As a reader some books are inevitable. This one had nagged at me for years, before finally, I plunged in and it felt like meeting an old friend.

Here’s How Records Give You More Of What You Want

This sleeve is a genuine piece of history, and in it’s own stiff way everything it says about the value of LPs still holds true…

Down winding roads & through tree tunnels into the land of Wow

I’ve just returned from a three-day visit to the Port Eliot Festival, in St Germans, Cornwall. It’s hard to put into words just how good and right the place and atmosphere felt. On the last stage of the drive you wind through a series of roads that alternately give views across small fields that are…

The Revenant

Magpie Tales blog invited people to submit a poem or vignette based on this picture. She’ll get you in the end, Stretched out and unaware, Or watchfully expectant, She’ll come, she always does. Unable to resist, you’ll slip Down gradually, gratefully, Allowing sky blue water To do its work. Hag-like at times, she crouches, Opening…

RIP Nora Ephron

Very sad to hear that Nora Ephron has died. ‘When Harry Met Sally’ is one of my favourite films. Her script, along with the excellence of the two leads, make it one of a very limited number of pitch-perfect romantic comedies. In a genre that’s dominated by knuckle-chewingly bad, syrupy nonsense, with typically one dimensional…

Into the Narroways – a landscape of words

Landscapes, imagined and remembered, have always played a central role in literature.

The fascinating relationship between writers and the British landscape is currently explored in a new exhibition at The British Library: Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands. Here are some thoughts it inspired.

Booker Prize 2011 – A triumph for the genre novel?

The dust has settled and the shoot-out at the literary salon is over. Julian Barnes has outgunned The Sisters Brothers and the rest of the not-so-magnificent five. The critics and literati have grumbled and sniped, whilst that endangered breed, the booksellers have rubbed their hands with glee at a welcome boost to their sales.