Christopher Lee is dead, and no one is going to bring him back by dripping the blood of a virgin on his ashes in a deconsecrated London church (I walked past many such buildings last Christmas, I didn’t notice any jaded covenists hanging around waiting for dark, they all seemed to have been converted to […]
Gentle reader, after something of a drought, I am very pleased that a story of mine, ‘This Neil Armstrong is not dead’, has just been published in the latest edition of Cafe Irreal, and I am very grateful. I am particularly pleased that story has found a home. Click on the story title above and […]
Art is made to disturb. Science reassures. There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain. – Georges Braque
Imagine if Dan Brown had the gumption to really whack us with a truly bizarre confection of a conspiracy about the Catholic Church, instead of that wimpy pile he served up. If you are going to show us an imaginary dark world hidden by a conspiracy of the ages, have a real red hot go […]
(Having published five short stories (one of them twice!) its fairly important that I make an arse of myself by drawing a comparison between George Orwell and, well, moi.) I purchased a copy of a slim George Orwell volume, ‘Why I write’, part of the Penguin Great Ideas series, last (European) summer when I was in […]
Anthony Burgess, book reviewer extraordinaire, amongst many other things, dared to opine that book reviews have no effect. That cannot be true, for when I saw the (very favourable) review of the first volume of his confessions, Little Wilson and Big God in the Sydney Morning Herald, I took my brand new Commonwealth Bank key […]
I am sad today to hear of the death of Tom Uren, a big man with a huge heart, one of those rare people, a politician of conviction who lived to be of service to others. He survived the horrors of imprisonment by the Japanese during the Second World War, and witnessed the atomic bombing […]
In her list of year’s best short fiction in her December Clavis Aurea column in Apex magazine, Charlotte Ashley gives an honourable mention to my story, ‘My Life as a Lizard‘. I am grateful to Ms Ashley for her kindness, and for her original review, and of course to the folk at Crossed Genres magazine who […]
It has been at least a year since I quoted this here, so time to do it again: Horace Tott spent an uneventful life in Cheshire always intending to write a large book on English magic, but never quite beginning. And so he died at seventy-four, still imagining he might begin next week, or perhaps […]
Souls just out of their graves having to answer for lives most of them never understood in the first place. Such hard lives. Lila, by Marilynne Robinson
Nobody is looking 