Love Sex Death And Words, Suprising Tales From A Year In Literature by John Sutherland and Stephen Fender arrived as a complimentary advance copy today. Calendrical in form it uncovers a true surprising Read more [...]

I used to say it was a way of offsetting my nicotine footprint but in not smoking I’ll just have to admit that cycling the ten mile round trip to my office at Southbank Centre has been an invigorating Read more [...]

Today is September the 11th.. It is the anniversary of the plane crash. The co-pilot was my father and he died along with everyone else on the flight. It was 1972. Today is also a great celebration. Read more [...]

“You get all your work because your black” spouted the bullish bald diminutive head of an Essex arts centre, as his glass of wine jabbed and swayed precariously in front of his spiky bespectacled pink forehead. His loosened tongue had found itself tangled around a twisted idea confounded by oxygen and ego. But here he was in the majority so it didn't matter. And the majority never feel like the majority until a minority, by surreptitiously breathing, reminds them. Read more [...]

After the reading, performance or whatever you want to call it I walk alone to The Living Room. Tonight its the VIP relaunch of a “newly refurbished” Living Room on Deansgate and friend who is Read more [...]

“Please, sit” says Andrew Biswell the proud director of Manchester's newest literary institution. And so I sit in the chair of Anthony Burgess who famously wrote A Clockwork Orange. The International Read more [...]

I wake at the Midland Hotel in Manchester. Words from the WH Auden Poem Night Mail are framed upon the walls of this opulent display of past glory. The midland is one of the great railway hotels Read more [...]

“welcome to th.. one fif.. virgi.. tr.. to ...ster w.. will be .arr.. a.. Eust.. ...ease ..ave.. tic...s ready for ins..ect..tion”. Virgin rail's on board tanoid announcements are rubbish Read more [...]

Stop. For three or four years I toured England with John Bramwell of I am Kloot and Henry Normal a poet and head of wildly successful film and TV production company Babycow productions. In the mid Read more [...]