Essays, book news and events — a single feed, filterable by type.
Sep 2015 · Blog
I asked a top lawyer, a QC and sound environmentalist, whether he had any moral qualms about defending corporate environmental offenders. ‘Not at all. A surgeon would operate to save the life of Jack…
Read more →Aug 2015 · Blog
In Highgate Cemetery, a forested hillside contains tumbling tombs. Star attraction is the grave of Karl Marx, beside a wide and gravelled path. This time, I came to hunt down other graves. As a…
Read more →Jun 2015 · Blog
Which books should a writer obliterate? Rupert Thomson chose two at the Stoke Newington Bookshop last night – his novels Soft, and Air & Fire. His reason for doing so is that he always felt he would write…
Read more →May 2015 · Blog
My big writing projects can take decades. I’m not slow, but redraft a great deal. Of late, I’ve felt a desire to clean the slate. Two novels are ready to go, and a narrative poem.…
Read more →May 2015 · Blog
In his piece on the Death of the Novel in The Guardian, Will Self comments on his own PhD Creative Writing student: Creative writing programmes burgeoning throughout our universities are ‘a self-perpetuating and self-financing literary set-aside scheme…
Read more →Sep 2014 · Books
A modern teenage dystopia. The world has seen no girls born for sixteen years. Karen was the last girl and Steven her twin. Their Dad’s of the old school. He turns their garden into…
Read more →Jul 2014 · Blog
Did I laugh at Richard Bean’s Great Britain at the National Theatre. Yes … largely at the crudity of the tabloid editor, at the buffoonery of the Metropolitan Commissioner. Was I braced by fierce insights into…
Read more →Sep 2013 · Blog
Here’s a wee film I made about about Haldane while also setting a writing challenge, made by the Review team up at the BBC in Glasgow. It was made as part of a recently finished…
Read more →Feb 2011 · Books
As TV cameras roll, a Tibetan boy lama is assassinated in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The event is a coup for media mogul Mark Rider, a triumph for Chinese General Xi, and a tragedy…
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