A couple of years ago I heard novelist Ian McEwan talking about his novel Saturday, lamenting the fact that work doesn’t crop up in novels these days. Characters do everything in the modern novel, other than work – or if they do, there’s no particular detail paid to the minutiae of their trade, unless, of […]
How many albums have Oasis released since What’s the Story Morning Glory? The correct answer here is ‘ who cares? they’ve all been shit’. Alan McGee, founder of creation records and the man who pushed Oasis into the spotlight in the first place is convinced that their latest album is (finally) worth listening to – […]
Imagine the scene: The revolutionary court stands to order as its three women judges enter. There’s a tension in the air, the atmosphere is electric, as the accused stands in all his fuzzy-faced glory. There was a time in the mid-eighties when all you could hear on the radio had his reverbed vocals, and now […]
Here’s an oddity from last Friday’s business supplement to the Irish Times. Despite the – so hard to avoid a cliche here – tumult? turmoil? meltdown? crash? in banking and on the markets the paper found space for a short article on the “Growing importance of protecting company data.” Space was, however, lacking for the […]
“It may come to us as something of a shock to realise that many of the texts that we treat as English originals are in fact translations, some from other languages, some from older forms of English, some from both. The Bible, The Iliad, Beowulf, the works of Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hugo, Goethe, […]
Aleksandra Lojek-Magdziarz writes for the Guardian on Polish matters. She is certainly on top of her brief. Check this out from August 1st: “Are Poles in Britain really starting to go home? Right now, I have no plans to do so, but you never know.” Note the effortless shift from “Poles” to “me.” She continues […]
A good thing about the internet is it allows you to check if that vague feeling you had about the lie of the media land is correct. The vague feeling I had – vague because I don’t monitor newspapers – was that there has been a rash of articles about how this recession is not […]
Over at the Guardian book blog there’s a debate blowing after a post dealing with Jim Crace’s plans to retire. The post has provoked all sorts of reactions regarding the merits of a writer’s age/youth, many largely missing the point made by Crace. Perhaps the most worrying thing, though, regarding the post is the implication […]
As I write, September 25th seems like it’s going to be a long long day. Far too much of what makes the “average” shrink tick occupies my own allotment of infinity, where laboured breathing buffs up a damp silvery fog incumbent of what should be Thursday. Not for the first time, and most certainly not for the last, […]
Lynnrd Skynrd‘s Sweet Home Alabama had two things going for it (more than many songs): A riff to launch a thousand ships, and an authenticity that was carved into the song by both its lyrics and delivery. Its two-fingered salute to Neil Young was just part of it. This song stood on its own merits, […]
