Posts

  • The Brief and Extraordinary Life of Robert Capa

    THE BRIEF AND EXTRAORDINARY LIFE OF ROBERT CAPA

    Picture this: Ingrid Bergman is on-set.  She’s playing the role of Irene Wagner in Roberto Rossellini’s ‘Fear’, based on the novel by Stefan Zweig.  She receives a telegram, perhaps a phone call.  She is informed that her one-time lover, Robert Capa, is dead, killed by a landmine […]

  • WRITING WITH LIGHT…

    Back when I was a child, in what was a relatively strange childhood, I found myself at Kingham Hill School.  I boarded there for two years.  It was the third and last boarding school I  attended between the ages of seven and sixteen, and – certainly more than the earlier two – that school had […]

  • THE WHISKEY POETS
  • THE WHISKEY POETS in London!!

    We’d love for you to come and join us at The Islington on Tolpuddle Street in London on the evening of Wednesday, August 19th.  This is a combined book and music event.  There will be a reading from the latest novel, ‘Mockingbird Songs’, and then a brief introduction to the band and the album, ‘Low […]

  • Win a first edition ‘Mockingbird Songs’…

    Follow the link in this post to win not only a first edition of ‘Mockingbird Songs’, but also a copy of the new Whiskey Poets’ album, Low Country’ …

  • The Suburbs of Hell…

    The prompt for this particular article was conversation with a colleague in a restaurant in Lyon. She asked about my son, now eighteen years of age, who is in the process of interviews and selections for university. He has been accepted by four universities thus far, three of them for computer-related studies, one of them […]

  • Reflections on a certain crime…

    Some while ago I was asked by the Wall Street Journal to write a piece concerning ‘unknown’ or forgotten literary classics.  Having recently spent a considerable amount of time in France, I decided to share my thoughts about several French writers, now widely available in English, who seemed yet to be unheard of by my […]

  • A CHRISTMAS POEM…

    I simply am a simple man,
    I have no faith, no master plan,
    I take offence at none at all
    save those who try to say we’ll fall,
    if we believe in other stuff,
    the stuff they think is just enough,
    to keep them straight and right and true,
    like God and Christ and Allah […]

  • An Eye for an Eye…

    In recognition of the twenty-one innocent victims of the November 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, I was asked by the Mail to pen a few words.  Instead of writing a journalistic piece, I decided to express my thoughts on the subject in a more personalised way.  Here is a fictionalised account from a survivor of the […]

  • The demise and fall of the book….

    A recent conversation with some very good friends of mine has confirmed something that I – and many others – have been aware of for a very considerable time. The UK, along with many other countries, is no longer reading. Of course there are those who read. I am not saying that no-one is reading, […]

Translate »