We continue today's maritime theme with the latest in our series of aesthetic appreciations of sublime machines… The Battleship is one of the most glorious, evocative and ultimately useless machines ever created by human beings. They’re fast: in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, they were the fastest things on the high ... Read More...
Month: June 2011
In a special guest post, author Sam Llewellyn explains why people misunderstand the purpose of maritime fiction, and why he founded the Marine Quarterly magazine... Brrring, went the telephone. Hello, said a woman’s voice, I am a researcher for Woman’s Hour on BBC Radio 4 and we are doing a programme on ... Read More...
The unsettled weather of the last few days - the British weatherman's 'sunny spells' interspersed with the same's 'thundery showers' - brings to mind a poem by Louis MacNeice, June Thunder. It was published in 1938, and it's difficult to read it now without thinking of it as pre-war, a foreshadowing ... Read More...
After reality shows like Big Brother and its spawn, the new programmes that are denounced as representing all that is low in British television are The Only Way is Essex (now on the ITV Player), and Made in Chelsea (E4, Mondays 10pm). These programmes are "structured reality" and are meant to show real ... Read More...
In about 1996, I got a deal to write a book about unlicensed boxing. I was arrogant enough to think I could actually write a book. I wish I had the excuse of being young, but I wasn’t really. I was just younger, which is no excuse at all. What ... Read More...
According to Adam Curtis’ documentary All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (reviewed, not glowingly, by Gaw here), mankind is facing an existential crisis brought on by the realisation that computers will not, as we expected, deliver Utopia, but have instead left us feeling powerless in a system we ... Read More...
In my former house, a large pile of junk mail accumulated every day. The task of picking this up from the floor and putting it in the bin became a daily chore. Now I’m happily installed in an apartment block, I have to say I do miss the local glossies ... Read More...
On Wednesday we drew the winners of the book of the month, which for June is This Party's Got to Stop by Rupert Thomson. The Book Club winners are: Cameron Foster, Isabelle Smith, David Sweet, Nicole Constable, Jon Hotten, Tom Farrington, Sally Willcock, Samantha OKeeffe and Sheila Woodward. The League Of Dabblers winners ... Read More...
W.G. Hoskins' The Making of the English Landscape, first published in 1955, has in many ways been overtaken by later studies, but is still the classic of its subject – and is undoubtedly the best written. Hoskins is animated by a love and deep, intimate knowledge of certain local landscapes - ... Read More...
One of the stories I grew up with, that I heard a hundred times at my mother's knee, was the tale of the glib hatter. When I say “at my mother's knee” I am using a cliché, of course. For one thing, I did not literally squat at my mother's ... Read More...
