Faber & Faber

I know, I know, back I come, tail between my legs... My excuse this time is that I moved house, and to some extent we're still unpacking. Even prior to that I ought to have written up my adventures last November teaching Dickensian descriptive writing in Argentina - or at least linked to this essay of mine like so, which gives my more or less complete thoughts on the matter. My sponsor was the British Council, with whom I very ...

So Gilbert Adair is gone, and the fine tributes that have followed already are a splendid expression of his achievements as a writer, as well as the good friends and impressions that he made everywhere. I first discovered Gilbert Adair for myself as a young reader at a time (the mid 1980s) when he was one of a select band of critical writers whose acute literary-visual sensibilities made cinema feel like a significant 20th-century creative endeavour, and a lustrous aesthetic ...

Amid the broad spectrum of print reviews garnered by my Crusaders back in 2008 (the 'broad' being a huge bonus for a debut-novelist, and the 'spectrum' probably a necessary corollary of his fledgling level of attainment) I seem to remember the Telegraph, both Daily and Sunday, being kind enough to review the novel while finding a fair few things to criticise as well as praise. Fair do's; and for that very reason I was pleasd to see that in his ...

Last month I had two distinctive engagements at the Durham Book Festival: the first being the furthering of my nefarious plot to re-infect the modern world with Late Victorian Gothic (for a report on which see here); the second the presentation of an essay commissioned from me by the Festival and addressing the prospects for the economy of North East England in the depressed years that lie ahead. That essay was published locally as a pamphlet, and its text is ...

As you's know, it’s mainly Twitter for me these days; and there the other week I was joshing with some Newcastle fan whom I’ve never met about whether we would take Andy Carroll back, in the event that Liverpool thrust him in our direction, nose and eyes averted toward high heaven... Just banter, as I say, because despite big Andy missing something of a sitter the week before he was said to link up well with Suarez in a win ...

Hollywood, politics, and charitable work & donation: they certainly all do mix, whether or not you care for the theory and/or the practice. The Democrats, traditionally, have enjoyed the support of a classier, artier, wittier showbusiness crowd than have the GOP - in public, at least. The artistes who have come out in this video on behalf of ex-President Clinton's Foundation are comedic performers in the main, but there among them is Sean Penn, who has - to be fair ...

So I’m gazing into the depths of the black mirror of my first ever fantasy-fiction convention... FantasyCon 2011, in Brighton, this Saturday October 1. I’m down to be reading from Doctor Forrest at 1030 in Room 134 of the Royal Albion Hotel. Beyond that, who knows...?My slot is between Julia Knight and Reggie Oliver, so I’ll have to bring my game and hope that their fanbases might look kindly, if darkly, on my sacrificial offering. Perhaps I’m lucky to finish ...

Very interesting this week to see the sudden, riled, edgy urging of a Plan B For Growth/Contra Recession by a good many financial journalists – this urging upon a Chancellor who clearly has wished to be seen as a Man of Iron, and whose confidence is probably rice-paper-thin right now, as the economic forecasts start to turn over the ballast in everybody’s guts. In these circumstances it’s no wonder that Ed Balls, with his mildly psychotic and probably permanent air ...

Of all the persuasive things I read in July perhaps the one that took up most solid residence among my mental furnishings was a 'tweet' by the excellent PatrickOsgood, Assistant Editor at Oil & Gas Middle East magazine: “We're screwed, right? By ‘we’ I mean flabby westerners in advanced economies...” To wit: earlier this month I spent a week’s family holiday abroad, a proportion of which was spent watching BBCNews24, aghast, and debating the usefulness of plastic bullets in situations ...

Where was I...? Oh yes, Norman Geras. Proprietor of as thoughtful a weblog as you're liable to find, he made these comments last month (on the eighth anniversary of his celebrated site) in respect of some recent "difficulties in blogging": "Some of the reasons for them are obvious: this particular debate has been had, and one doesn't feel as if there's anything to add; even if there may be, I don't feel like writing about the same thing yet again; ...