Orwell’s Perfect Boozer

Where do you put that memory as you sit in a café in Dizengoff Street, when it taps you on the shoulder and asks if this seat is taken?

The Dud Avocado follows the period young Sally Gorce chooses an expat existence in Paris over college...

With these impedimenta carefully corded up in a strong deal box I felt myself equal to any photographic emergency...

Unlike the ancient Odyssey or the modernist Ulysses, the epic work that is Amazon delivers immediate gratification to all customers...

John le Carré became a diligent student of nineteenth-century German literature. He was recruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service while at Oxford...

The biggest delight of my Conan Doyle sleuthing may well be a false clue, even if the facts are not in doubt...

The art work in fiction is less likely to be the basis for some epiphany than to be a MacGuffin...

Paris wasn’t then what it is now...

To experience a version of the cool exhilaration of a mid-twentieth-century American jazz night, one might start by listening to an iconic Miles Davis recording...

Did Marinetti's visit to Argentina contribute to the spread of Fascism?

It is the Donkey’s acceptance and internalisation of the judgement from on high that is so shockingly modern as it prefigures the mentality of victims in witch hunts, show trials, struggle sessions and other kinds of brain washing...

It seems there are some writers who teach you how to write and there are others who teach you what to write about...

Michael Pietsch and David Foster Wallace’s collaboration on Infinite Jest highlights the intervenient role of the editor as the mediator between the author and the reader, or the author and the publisher...

We find ourselves in New Hampshire, or Mexico, driving about, or at home, and writing and thinking ahead...

I don’t catch Phillis Wheatley’s joke at first...

Who knew that William Bankes was an amateur of Thomas Love Peacock! Perhaps I should have...

I’d pounce on the British music newspapers, the NME and Melody Maker...