A while back I read Specimen Days, by Michael Cunningham. It is a triptych of novellas bound up in a single volume - there was one that I didn’t like at all (”In the Machine”), one I liked so-so (”Like Beauty”), and one I like a lot: “The Children’s Crusade”. This third story is about […]
I had the slightly dubious privilege of a press ticket for Othello last night, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Oxford Playhouse.
I sat next to the Press Officer who had organised the tickets, as well as free drinks at half-time. She was nice. She didn’t even seem to mind that I had quite […]
I re-watched The Lives of Others on DVD on the weekend. Things are never as good as they were at the cinema, but this is still a great depiction of the insidious, creepy police state in East Germany.
A friend noticed this fascinating irony: in the “free West”, twenty years later, many people are now quite […]
I had very high expectations for Terror and Liberalism, by Paul Berman. Lately I have taken up the strategy of trying to read good books that argue for opinions different to my own. I was firmly against the American invasion of Iraq, and having read that T & L is one of the most cogent […]
Since I moved to England, I have worried quite a lot about growing old. Really, there’s not that much difference between me and all the suckers who get roped in by the ads for “Oil of Olay” (and why did they stop calling it “Oil of Ulan”, anyway?) Except I’m not trying to buy my […]
I play football every Wednesday night at the Oxford Brookes University, up on the hill overlooking Oxford town. Ever since I started playing up there, one of the other guys who plays has really annoyed me. He is a good player himself, but he constantly moans and curses whenever anyone else makes a mistake. If […]
I started a snowball fight in the grand old quadrangle at work today.
The fight gradually grew, until there were about 20 people involved. You can’t see most of them in the photo below, because they were all on the other team, trying to pelt me and James.
It was so refreshing to see these normally mild-mannered […]
Just a link today - I came across an interview with Heath Ledger in the New York Times, from 2007. One of those things that becomes much more meaningful in retrospect…
“Last week I probably slept an average of two hours a night,” he said. “I couldn’t stop thinking. My body was exhausted, and my mind […]