blogs
Three Contenders for Best Film Ever & ‘Homo Deus’
Okay, little originality in the choices here. But they do divide people and I want to give my penny’s worth…for what it’s worth.Citizen Kane The reason I think that a lot of people don’t dig Welles’ g ........
Why Great Literature is Important
I’ve just finished re-reading Christopher Booker’s magnum opus, The Seven Basic Plots. If you have never come across this magnificent book, I urge and beg and plead with you to get hold of a cop ........
Work-In-Progress
I thought I ought to put a blog out there, as I haven’t done anything in that department for a while. The thing is, I’ve been working away at my 2nd novel (as yet untitled) and haven’t actually ........
A Long Hibernation
2005 seems a long way away now. I’d seen Identity, a film starring John Cusack, a few years before and it had inspired me to write a novel about a character with a fragmented personality. I thou ........
What we learn from screenwriting
Writing screenplays is a very good discipline for other forms of writing. You have to get off the mark quickly with a screenplay: you don’t have fifty pages to introduce your characters and settin ........
The Man Who Planted Trees
Ecologists and climatologists, geographers and geologists, have known for quite some time the baleful effect Man has had upon the Environment. Long before Rachel Carson raised the alarm in the e ........
Hubert Selby Jr and Progress
Is it possible, or even necessarily sensible, to talk about Progress in terms of the novel? Jane Austen’s characters still speak with a quiet intensity over our shoulder like an intimate friend ........
The Colossus of Decatur Street
At least two generations have passed since Henry Miller raised some dust and threw it in the eye of the Establishment with his no-holds-barred attitude to writing and living. There really had not ........
Overrated Hemingway?
I recently read A Farewell To Arms, Hemingway’s anti-war novel from 1929. This isn’t the first Hem novel I’ve read, but it will probably be the last. Apart from the scene where the hero, Lieutenan ........