Aesthetic symbols

Having been interested in comics for a very long time, I have of course been aware of manga. Until now, … More

Not quite

Martin Scorsese has something of a reputation as a film maker who does movies about criminals in New York, but … More

Having recently read and written about Quicksilver, the book which precedes The Confusion in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle trilogy, there’s … More

Martin Scorsese enjoys making films about criminals. He likes representing their lives and their culture, and he often collaborates with … More

One thing I’ve had reinforced through watching the Rudolph Maté directed Robert Mitchum vehicle Second Chance (1953), is the total … More

I’m fortunate enough to be closely related to someone (my mum) who is something of an authority on the state … More

I inhabit a timeline in which the definitive version of Michael Moorcock’s huge fantasy sequence is The Tale of The … More

On the last day of last year, the death was announced of one of the most enigmatic and under-recorded figures … More

Orlando is a very complex and sophisticated film based on a very complex and sophisticated book which I haven’t read. … More

The American economy has had its ups and downs—in the 1970s manufacturing crashed so badly that several large cities were … More

Aladdin Sane was my first Bowie album. Not the first Bowie I heard, and not even the first of his … More

My exploration of Kim Stanley Robinson’s oeuvre is proceeding in a kind of pincer movement, reading books alternately from either … More

It’s a strange privilege to have had a grandfather who was, as he once put it, ‘world famous to five … More

This Neal Stephenson dude likes to go large. Enormous books, with vast casts of characters, containing epic and sprawling storylines … More