I’m not sure anybody really had lists of best records before Nick Hornby invented them, but that is great. It’s taken me about forty years to hear the majority of that stuff, and if I was now a 16 year old who’s […]

I used to know someone who was an artist, a painter, and she did a number of jobs to make a living, such as teaching. But she would devote some months a year completely to her own work. She lived in a rural area […]

One of the strangest aspects of all of this is the government ministers insisting civil servants go back to the office. From what I know from people working in Whitehall based departments, at least, is that […]

Didn’t this happen, partially, in the eighties with the part of Labour leaving to form Social Democratic Party, who ended up merging with the Liberals? Things do change in politics, but there still seems to be […]

I met someone in Montreal whose parents had been neighbours and contemporaries of Leonard Cohen. They told her that he really was as charming and genuine as he appeared to be. If he bumped into them or anyone else […]

This is an interesting article by Tom Chivers examining why women in the UK are so worried about being attacked by a stranger even though men are more likely to be attacked, and the UK has a low and declining […]

I knew a few people at that time who had just graduated as teachers, and what struck me was that those in state schools had to be fully qualified in their subject and even in a teacher shortage would never fill in […]

As any Labour leader has enough trouble holding together the coalition which is their own party, forming a pact with two others, which are also coalitions, would be very difficult. I think there is also the […]

Since Brexit, attitudes towards immigration in the UK have become more favourable in general. A lot of the worries about the EU seem to have been about the belief that the government had no real grip on the […]

You don’t seem to hear the radio or any music much in the shops here in London at least any more. When you see films from the seventies or eighties and there is a scene in a shop, there is often something playing […]

I know someone who thinks the phrase “bunch of fives” is a corruption of “bunch of Fyffes”. You only have five fingers in your fist, not multiples of five, and so the comparison with a bunch of bananas makes more sense.

I remember seeing both The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye at a university film society in the seventies. The Long Goodbye seemed then a cynical debunking of the Marlowe myth, but I’ve seen it a couple of times […]

I don’t know. Perhaps he’s just power hungry – I looked at his wikipedia page earlier, and it was big red blank with a swastika on it, so someone thinks that (it’s now been taken down and gone back to his normal entry.)

Proust started writing the book, after a failed earlier attempt, when he was about 36, the age when for most of us life stops being one series of new experiences, good or bad, but the time when you start thinking […]

The earliest books I remember reading, like others here, are the Jennings books and then science fiction, starting with H G Wells, and then the other classics of the genre, but then for no reason I can remember I […]

It would be true of Mick and Keith, except the teacher’s son and factory workers’s son seem to have swapped accents sometime in the sixties.

Still, after all that he did with Dan Dare in saving us from the Mekon, a peerage is the least he deserves.

I’m glad to see that Lord Digby Jones has had the courage to take on the most significant problem facing us as a nation, people from London who drop the g at the end of words. The noble lord has moved the c […]

There’s also this very good mash-up by Robbie Robertson of On the Nature of Light with This Bitter Earth by Dinah Washington which he did for the Scorsese film Shutter Island.

I like Richter, and he is one of t […]