Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A life lived among relics

    A life lived among relics

    Apparently I’ve been to Anglesey Abbey before, according to everyone else in my family who I am claimed to have gone with (and who I went there with this time). This purported visit isn’t supposed to have involved going inside the house, however, so I think I might be forgiven for having forgotten wandering around Read more

  • Flawed immersion

    Flawed immersion

    Having bought a Playstation 4, the first games console I have ever owned, so that I can play CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 when it comes out, I’ve taken the opportunity to catch up with the same studio’s The Witcher III: Wild Hunt.  I enjoyed the second instalment of this series a great deal on Read more

  • A cautionary elegy

    A cautionary elegy

    William Boyd thinks that The Radetzky March is ‘one of the enduring monuments of twentieth-century European literature’; I’d never heard of it before a friend recommended it to me. It’s quite likely that Boyd hasn’t heard of the books I think are ‘enduring monuments’ either (although I actually think that sounds like a terrible, dead Read more

  • Stoke-on-huh?

    Stoke-on-huh?

    Sam Wade’s Stoke (published by the fabulous ShortBox) is set, presumably, in Stoke. Given that the place-name element ‘stoke’ means (roughly) ‘place’, there are quite a lot of those in England. With its ethnic diversity, mattress store and bare-knuckle kick-boxing, my guess was that it’s probably not the true-blue, rural Stoke that I live in, Read more

  • Molecular anecdoty

    Molecular anecdoty

    I don’t follow cook-book publishing that closely (or indeed at all), but you can’t help noticing a few things if you work in a library. One is that we seem to have bid farewell to the conventions of my youth, where the majority of cook-books were either reference manuals, like Bee Nilson’s The Penguin Cookery Read more

  • Convincing melancholy ghosts

    Convincing melancholy ghosts

    Ég Man Þig is a quietly melancholy horror movie from Iceland, based on a novel by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir. Its title translates to English as I Remember You, and it is indeed largely concerned with memory and loss; it is in fact an outstanding example of the way that fantastical forms of fiction can deal effectively Read more