Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
On St Patrick’s Day 2005 this piece appeared on the SAU Blog. It is somewhat in the spirit of my grumpy thoughts on book clubs from 2006 in the same…
Around the time I wrote this I was partial to insider accounts of film-making, and was favourably impressed with the sheer amount of time wasting this seemed to involve. I…
William Gerhardie is a writer whose fame rests on obscurity. Prominent early in his career, and feted by Waugh and Greene as their better, he later became “lost.” Being “lost”…
Here is the original. Tom Shone’s big idea seemed more radical in 2005 than it does now – indeed now it is pretty much mainstream. The triumph of what is still…
From The Social Affairs Unit blog on January 5th 2005. Since this was written, and even more “modernised” version, the BBC’s “Sherlock”, has been made and widely celebrated. While I initially…
Downfall loomed large in 2005 as a cultural phenomenon. Perhaps, at that point, the fact that some of the survivors of Hitler’s bunker were still alive made it all the…
I read quite a lot of Neil Postman about a decade ago. Always a readable and provocative voice, I must admit I take him rather less seriously since reading more…
One of the disheartening things (for me) about how the online world has developed is the primacy of television as a cultural reference point. In the early years of…
