I did something last week that I seldom do. I walked into the Canterbury branch of Waterstone’s1. I wanted to pick up a copy of the new James Bond book, Devil May Care. As you may or may not care, this book was commissioned by the estate of Ian Fleming to continue the Bond novel [...]
This blog has been banging on like a misfiring Energizer Bunny since July 2004. At that point, I had written the first draft of my novel Déjà Vu, and it was – I think – in the hands my erstwhile editor, the top notch Aliya Whiteley1. My first entry, entitled Reading the classics, began: Today [...]
Melvyn Bragg’s Radio Four programme on the history of ideas, In Our Time, rarely fails to be interesting and provocative. This week the topic is ‘materialism’. Not the worrying trend to dribble over the latest Apple hardware (I stand guilty), but the well-grounded notion that the universe contains only physical matter, not non-corporeal entities like [...]
I’ve just said au revoir to an old friend, Daniel, who came to stay for the weekend. Before he left, we had a chat about things we hate in relation to language. I thought it might be fun to put these on my blog. Linguistic thingies that I hate: (5) Top five lists Cynical attempts [...]
Cor blimey, guvn’rs and guvn’sses, it is awfully hot in southern India right now – though it is, as our genial hosts never tire of telling us, actually rather cold. I’m writing this in a former French principality called Pondicherry (the computer has already had a Blue Screen of Death; no escaping Windows) under a [...]
A quick post to say that my review of Paul McAuley’s Cowboy Angels is now available on the Interzone site. Thanks to reviews editor Paul Raven.
We were all very worried when Paul, a childhood friend of mine, turned up at school with a stethoscope and thermometer, and could only look on in horror as he entered medical school. He went completely off the rails a few years back, and became a specialist registrar at the UCL Institute of Neurology. Perhaps [...]
One of the writers whose portraits I use for my screen saver, Norman Mailer, has died aged 84 of renal failure, according to the BBC. This short video obituary is pretty much on-the-money: quite a likeable, gregarious, opinionated and controversial figure who broke noses figuratively and literally, but I can’t think of another writer who [...]
As a psychologist, I should probably have something sensible to say about the relationship between anxiety and creativity. *whistles tunelessly* Oh, wait, here’s a graph: This n-curve is a plot of the Yerkes-Dodson law. In short, it suggests that performance on a task varies as a function of arousal, i.e. alertness. Performance is optimal when [...]
Just for Debra, here’s a test post to see if my scribblings appear in the Sunday Salon feed. Confused? You will be.