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A humane document
Mother London was something of a surprise to me, inasmuch as it’s something I needed to read, something that should have been more or less top of my reading list, but which I simply happened to read by chance. Firstly it was chance that I happened to spot it in my friend Dave’s bookshop, and… Read more
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Angry apotheosis
I read bits and pieces of Charley’s War as a kid, in copies of Battle picked up from jumble sales and charity shops, but I was never a big fan of war comics, so I didn’t exactly follow it. The episodes I did see made a big impression on me however. Even given Pat Mills’… Read more
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Ammunition
Behave is a behemoth of a book. Unless you know quite a lot about neurobiology already, you’ll need to read the appendices: including those, it clocks in at seven-hundred and seventeen pages. You may well be familiar with longer reference books, or textbooks, or even novels, but this is a work of popular science –… Read more
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Sculpted in the clay of language
Christopher Tolkien made it perfectly clear in Beren and Lúthien, published in 2017, that it was the last book he would produce as the editor of his father’s considerable legacy of unfinished writings. As he was then in his 93rd year, this seemed a reasonable point at which to hang up his red pencil (or… Read more
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Implausibly realistic
I’ve got to admit I don’t really know Spike Lee’s oeuvre. When certain directors release a new movie I fee able to talk quite confidently about their creative progression, the development of their technique and so forth. What I do know about Lee’s formal approach is that he is given to juxtaposing documentary or newsreel… Read more
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Beaten, stabbed, tossed into traffic and hospitalised
A review of a comic like Kick-Ass really doesn’t mean much unless it’s written by someone who closely follows the commercial comics which are its creative context. It is itself a commercial comic, but in more or less exactly the same way that Quentin Tarantino makes films about cinema, it is also a comic about… Read more
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