The Oxford Murders Review, Nthposition, 2005
This review is one which has come to occupy a certain place in my mental landscape of being a writer. A review reflects many things, and one is the circumstances of…
Annual Report, Nthposition, July 2010
Here I tried to capture something of the spirit of those months and years which have yet to be satisfactorily named. At the time, “credit crunch” was all the rage,…
The Statistician’s Parable. Nthposition, May 09
This was written on a phone, a Nokia of some kind. There are two companion parables. Changing the sex of the character from sentence to sentence seemed profound at the…
Silence – A Fragment. Nthposition, March 2013
For some years now, I have been contemplating a philosophy of silence. Is that my most pretentious sentence yet? Possibly. Silence is fascinating. When we are most at ease with…
Hiatus and Hackathon
I haven’t posted in a few days, because I was in Glasgow – at a Hackathon . You can read my initial reflections at that link.
Exhibition review: “A German Dream: Masterpieces of Romanticism from the Nationalgalerie Berlin ” – Spectator, December 2004
My one appearance in the Spectator, and my one published piece of visual art criticism. A lot of “slightly” here, and “rather.” I don’t read the Spectator much anymore; its prose style…
Review of The Sancy Blood Diamond: Power, Greed and the Cursed History of One of the World’s Most Coveted Gems. Susan Ronald. TLS May 5 2005
This is a pretty good example of the capsule reviews I started out contributing to the TLS. Capsule reviews impose a certain discipline on the reviewer – longer word counts…
Review of Wolves in Ireland by Kieran Hickey, TLS, April 2012.
Going through my writings, I realise how little deals with something of great personal importance to me; nature and the natural world. Of course, semantic quibbling teaches us that “nature”…
