Category Archives: Asides
Artists teaching art
Mik Godley, the artist with whom I worked on Winter Fires, is threatened with redundancy from his part-time teaching post at Chesterfield College. It’s the third time in three years … Continue reading
Artful scientists
The relationship between art and science has been fractious since the Enlightenment, when practices that had often been seen as alternative ways of approaching the same truth began to be … Continue reading
A child’s view of the Miners’ Strike
Yesterday morning, Margaret Thatcher died. Her death has been followed by an explosion of polemic, encomium and vitriol, about what happened under her premiership and how it has shaped Britain … Continue reading
The useful uselessness of art
Human beings do not have to make art to survive, which is why it’s relegated to the highest (last) place in Maslow’s much quoted hierarchy of needs. But it’s a grave … Continue reading
The mailman’s authority
‘Alert always to “Wittgenstein’s distinction between all the trivia you can talk about, and all the essentials you can’t,” Steiner has labored not ever to obscure that distinction.’ George Steiner … Continue reading
Literary novels and the Counter-Reformation
The priests of the Temple of Literature have been issuing instruction, as the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced. John Walsh, writing in the Independent, was relieved by … Continue reading
Memories worth having
Is it worth it A new winter coat and shoes for the wife And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday Elvis Costello, Shipbuilding, 1983 The trouble with utilitarianism, apart from ethics, … Continue reading
Theatre as solidarity
We ask no money for our performances. We ask for the public to contribute with food products with extended shelf life to be offered to Houses which take care of … Continue reading
Montaigne as a blogger
‘There should be some legal restraint aimed against inept and useless writers, as there is against vagabonds and idlers. Both I and a hundred others would be banished from the … Continue reading
Pixelated death
Bad guys in movies used to come to sticky ends, in a bloody hammering of bullets or falling off tall buildings. Now, they disintegrate in an accelerating loss of pixels, … Continue reading
