Sometimes someone says something you’ve been trying to say (to yourself as much as anyone) for years. In a recent issue of Wire magazine (well, November 2015), Bridget Hayden supplied the copy for their Inner Sleeve column. This feature allows a musician or producer to talk about the cover art, usually to an L.P., that has meant the […]
I find Politics dangerously embarrassing. Dangerously, because my embarrassment about it makes me quietly leave the debate (any debate) to others. Dangerously, because everyone should involve themselves in politics (because politics has always already involved itself in them, not least in the formation of them as them (and, somewhere, as part of many bigger […]
A very long time ago – in a different historical period – I attended the Chilcott Inquiry, on one of the sessions during which Tony Blair gave his evidence. The first blog below explains the circumstances; the second blog gives my impressions. Both blogs appeared on the Channel 4 website. I remember arriving at the QEII […]
In 1988, I was an ambitious student journalist at Oxford University. Having missed out on the editorship of Isis magazine, I went for that of DEBATE: The Oxford Union Review – along with my co-editor, Samira Ahmed, now of the BBC. At that time, the President of the Oxford Union was Michael Gove, now of the […]
Here is what’s been happening. Mutants, the book of Selected Essays I have been working on (without always realising it) for sixteen years, is out. It can be bought from The Hive. It was published by the wonderful Seagull Books, Calcutta, who also published Life-Like. The editor was Naveen Kishore. I’m extremely grateful he gave me the […]
This talk was first delivered to students of the Creative Writing MA at Birkbeck on May 3rd 2016. Leicester City won the Premier League, and since then a great deal of the national conversation – online, in newspapers, in corridors – has been, ‘How did they do it?’ The next thing after that, of course, is, […]
Because we were asked to by the good people currently occupying Carnegie Library. Because we love libraries generally but we also specifically love our local libraries, in Lambeth, London. We want all ten of them to stay open as libraries, with librarians, not gyms, without librarians. And because this is something we could do. We’re […]
It is too easy to forget what a genius-level idea libraries are. But if, for a moment, you de-invent and then re-invent them, it’s not hard to imagine some slick young thinker getting up on his TED-legs to tell us how great if it would be for us to share books just as we now […]
It’s become a cliché to say your 1970/80s childhood has been stolen, your innocence lost. My earliest pop memory is Gary Glitter, in a wing-shouldered Bacofoil outfit, in a black and white broadcast (or on a black and white television), on Top of the Pops. But who, back then, among the famous and beloved was […]
I was recently asked by a local librarian to do all I could to help save five Lambeth libraries, and – just as importantly – the jobs of the librarians who work in them. If, after reading this, you’d like to contact Councillor Jane Edbrooke, her email address is jedbrooke@lambeth.gov.uk. Dear Councillor Jane Edbrooke, why shouldn’t you […]
