Category: Statecraft & Culture

IT is the library. Libraries were places of terror. Guarded by the austere and severe. The creaky floorboard was feared. Now metamorphosed into metroland ‘places to be’. Libraries have broken up their straight lines. There are little snugs, hang-outs, back-alleys, mazes, cul-de-sacs, booth-ala-record-shop. Surreal levels. Stairs and lifts to hidden floors. Is Floor 2 up…

The time not to interrupt my father was late Sunday evening. He stood at his chest of drawers with his transistor, often holding it at an angle. Sometimes he brushed his thick wavy black hair with two brushes, in rather elegant sweeping motions. I suspected this was his most precious hour of the week. He didn’t…

“Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide” confessed Joseph Heller. “And, simply, acting like an arse,” adds Ian Sansom. I read Catch-22 at school. It was my first engagement with polemics and paradox; or at least the first I could understand. Shakespeare enabled me to sit on the…

Cities are divided places; railways, canals, bridges and barriered ring-roads dissect communities allowing commerce to accelerate unhindered. A post-industrial patchwork has left isolated zones known now by their economic and social characteristics. Some areas are what Frederic M. Thrasher called ‘delinquency areas’. Bits of ‘turf’ where seeping damp of deprivation sits opposite red chino’d deli-land. Cafe Society cranes up at high-rise poverty…

Three things hit home from chatting to family and friends this week: !) The home is precious and becoming a luxury few can afford !) Lack of housing stock is a Social Catastrophe not being addressed !) Inequality is now demarked by ‘living space’ Growing up by the sea I love space, endless horizons, being…

Roni Horn’s piece at Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art is one of those show stoppers; the sort of exhibit that you can’t get past. A series of facial images taken seconds apart titled ‘Identity is a River’ it simply shows that in the space of fractions ‘we’ are many people; that our identities are fluid…

Enjoying the light relief of Stephen Fry’s latest bio as the sun shines outside in a frosty Cumbria; having read Moab is My Washpot awhile back I was looking forward to the humanity and self-deprecation of his story. He shares my fascination with Wagner and recently rescued W’s reputation from being the nasty backing track…

Andrew Neil on form looking at the ‘death of meritocracy’ in this programme from the Beeb: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00y37gk/Posh_and_Posher_Why_Public_School_Boys_Run_Britain/ The notion that the elite has stolen the gateway to politics; not just for the Tories but now also Labour. Neil is at his best here pouring acid scorn on our virtual closed shop of senior politics. Harold Wilson…