First coming across him as Peep Show‘s Mark, and since then on That Mitchell and Webb Look and the ten thousand comedy panel shows that litter the Dave channel, I find David Mitchell very, very funny. Which is why, when finding myself feeling rather down, I chose to read his autobiography. And while Back Story didn’t raise many belly laughs, it was still an amusing and pleasant way to pass some time. David Mitchell would be the first to admit that he’s not had the […]
“He ate little but drank much and vomited proportionally.”
A Dead man in Deptford is one hell of a book. Imagining the fascinating life and early death of Christopher ‘Kit’ Marlowe – Elizabethan playwright, poet and alleged spy – on opening I was a little worried that the language might be too dense (’tis written in the parlance of the time) but before long I was putting off sleep to read more while gleefully noting all of my new favourite olde words and pretty much wanting to roll around in the wonderful writing. While […]
The town, not the planet
In Dispatches from Pluto, British-born travel writer Richard Grant takes a trip to meet a friend in the Mississippi Delta, and ends up buying her father’s old plantation house. Moving his girlfriend and dog from a tiny Manhattan apartment, they throw themselves into Delta life – battling the snakes, armadillos and sometimes alligators that inhabit their garden, wrangling weeds that grow faster than they can yank them, hunting food for the table, discovering how hard it can be to heat a creaky old house […]
Come get some
“So long as there is a kingdom on this windswept island, there will be war.” I started reading Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories just over a month ago. As I’m now on the 4th instalment, I think it’s pretty safe to say that I’m a fan. Uhtred Uhtredsson started the series as the heir to Bebbanburg following the death of his older brother, until his father was killed by invading Danes and he was taken and raised by his father’s killer. Taking advantage of his absence, […]
A tale of wheeled cities
“It was a dark, blustery afternoon in Spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.” …And from that opening sentence on, I was hooked. In the distant future, in the aftermath of the Sixty Minute War which put paid to the world as we know it, a system called Municipal Darwinism arose. Evolving out of the need to dodge the volcanoes and earthquakes that rocked the earth following the war, mechanical cities […]
Bueller? Bueller?
Hello, Cannonballers! I’ve come to swell your ranks and bump up my yearly reading tally. I’m not nervous, honest… Life Moves Pretty Fast was a nostalgic and amusing start to my reading year. When you think of the best movies, the eighties don’t tend to jump immediately to mind. But Hadley Freeman begs to differ and takes us on a trip through some of her favourite eighties movies and what they taught us, as well as looking at what’s been lost in the movies of […]
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