If the past is “a foreign country”, as L.P. Hartley once wrote, then the advent of mobile phones is its hard border. I’m always glad I got 25 years on the pre-mobile side of that dividing line. Glad I got to experience things like school, university, and travel, before we all became tethered – for […]
RECOLLECTIONS MAY VARY
Death, taxes, and Hollywood war films portraying the Brits as pompous idiots. Some things in life you can be sure of… Recently, the Apple TV series “Masters of the Air” continued the longstanding tradition. In fact, it may even have taken it to new levels. In an East Anglian pub, the US airmen of the […]
IT’S BEEN A WHILE…
It’s been a while since I posted anything on this website. Well over 18 months, according to the date of my last post. About the same amount of time it took me to write “Operation Echo”, in fact. Never let it be said that I am not the ultimate mono-tasker. I never planned on leaving […]
THE ‘REAL’ ROCKY (MAYBE)
For any fan of the Rocky films, it is almost impossible to watch footage of an Oscar Bonavena fight without experiencing an uncanny sense of familiarity. Aside from a basic physical similarity between the Argentine heavyweight and Sylvester Stallone’s screen creation, there is something about the way the pair go about their business. Bonavena, the […]
HITCHCOCK’S HIDDEN MESSAGE
William Boyd’s excellent novel “Restless” touches upon an interesting period of World War 2 – the time before the United States entered the fray when Britain was doing all it could to persuade Americans to engage. Whether it was talk of enemy spies infiltrating New York society, or secret Axis invasion plans via South America, […]
THESE STORIES I’VE HEARD…
Wherever possible, I try to give my characters distinct voices. To describe some accent or verbal trait, then write dialogue that brings it out. I like to think it makes the characters more real, lifting them from the page and into the senses. And, now that I have belatedly started enjoying audiobooks, I sometimes wonder […]
THE TEAM THAT SURVIVED WW1
Even for a club whose early decades were so illustrious, there’s something special about the Aston Villa side that lifted the FA Cup in 1913. The fact that all eleven players would go on to survive the First World War is remarkable enough. That so many would still be teammates when Villa repeated the feat […]
DEBATABLE?
We live in a shouty world, don’t we? One where the volume on public discourse is stuck on max, the media stoke every possible division, and we are encouraged to spend our days at constant loggerheads with one another. I’ve been even more aware of this since dipping my toe back in social media – […]
FUTURE HISTORY
The members of 31st century society will have an entire millenium of human history to view in High Definition moving images. And that makes me wonder… How will that affect the way people think of ‘the past’? How will it change our very concept of time itself?
ONE MINUTE IN TOKYO
When writing a book, self-doubt is never far away. At some point, a familiar question will always find a way of popping into your head… ‘Is this really any good?’ Sport – the thing I used to write about – has an interesting relationship with self-doubt too. Its professional participants will generally go to great […]