Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • So bad it’s… bad

    So bad it’s… bad

    We were on holiday in Northumberland, near Hadrian’s Wall, visiting lots of Roman archaeological sites, so we thought we’d watch a movie set in that part of the world and that sort of time. The film Centurion is based on the story popularised by Rosemary Sutcliff in The Eagle Of The Ninth (1954) that the Read more

  • Roman holiday

    Roman holiday

    It’s a long time since I’ve been to a museum or a gallery, what with global pandemics and everything. We didn’t really set out to do so when we went to the English Heritage site Corbridge Roman Town, and to be honest we didn’t realise there was much of a visitor centre alongside the ruins. Read more

  • Founding a field

    Founding a field

    Finally, an academic has written a book about what I spend most of my time doing. Well, I say finally… it would be more to the point to say that I’ve finally got around to reading the book I bought several years ago. However, it is a very new thing that world-building has become the Read more

  • Doubling and singling

    Doubling and singling

    This is the second cook-book that I’ve read simply because it happens to be a comic published by Shortbox. Like the other one, Lucie Byron’s Food Baby, it’s aimed mainly at young people without a huge amount of culinary confidence or experience, cooking on a budget. In every parameter, I am not this target audience! Read more

  • Deniable plausibility

    Deniable plausibility

    I’ve been on a mission recently to catch up with the output of two of my favourite writers, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson. With Termination Shock, Stephenson makes a foray into territory more usually to be associated with Robinson—which is to say that the book is a piece of near-future climate fiction. Like Robinson’s Read more

  • Party in the temple

    Party in the temple

    I spent a while back there in the early noughties thinking that all the fusions had been tried, and that whatever new forms were going to emerge in music would be so outlandish I might find it hard to grasp them. Actually, it turns out there’s a lot of mileage left in the old stylistic Read more