Mild at heart
It’s a sweet, green, glowing dawn in north-west Scotland. All around us are empty hillsides of rock and heather. The…
Night on a bare mountain
Novelists are leery about letting the buzzwords of recent history into their books. The immediate past threatens to upstage the…
Our old Macca
The Paul people are out in force these days. A New Yorker profile, a book and a new documentary have…
Old school ties
It is incredibly hard to convey the fleeting invincibility and passionate self-significance that we feel on the cusp of adulthood.…
Sent to Coventry
The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like…
Crude mittens
Let me give you a free piece of relationship advice: just break up. If it’s more work than pleasure, if…
The trying game
On sketch shows, the wisdom once was that you needed a punchline. That is, a slightly hammy, summative sign-off to…
Grand designs
Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the…
Sweet nothings
Our hosts are Lauren and Drew and they want to talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or rather, they want to…
Big hooks but no mackerel
The narrative podcast remains a form in search of a genre. The template set by the hit show Serial —…
Soul-dead crypto world
Some things are explained so many times that they become unexplainable: we can only relate to them as something complicated…
Intelligent design
In Our Time is the best thing on Radio 4, possibly the best thing on the radio full stop. It…
From worst to best
It was something a friend said to me about The Revenant, Leonardo diCaprio’s bloody-minded and brutal Oscar vehicle: ‘The problem…
King of chat
In my parents’ house, the radio is always tuned to one of two stations: Magic FM and LBC. When Magic…
Fright night
Good evening! Come shivering on in through the garden side door, my friends, and distance yourselves in a semi-legal fashion…
The Midas touch
It’s well known that you should never meet your heroes because they will only disappoint you. Less commonly said, but…
Concrete poetry
Since technology is developing at such light-speed pace, why does it feel so strangely slow? There is a sense that…
Spreading the word
Nineteen fifty-six: the Suez crisis, the first Tesco, Jim Laker takes 19 wickets in a match. But also: Trinidadian pianist…
Lost in translation
Listening to the tacky and incomprehensible audio-adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel seriesSandman, I couldn’t stop thinking about the 19th-century…
A podcast about the literary canon that actually deepens your knowledge (sort of)
While most of life’s pleasures can be shared, reading is lonely. It’s more than possible for six friends to enjoy…
The grand inquisitor
I always want to know more about Louis Theroux, which is odd, since I’ve seen so much of him already.…
Beige-washed Burton
The BBC has been having a good pandemic. Stuck at home, a generation raised on podcasts and YouTube has discovered…
The real deal – or not
One of the stranger things that happened in the period just before lockdown was the sudden disappearance of audiences from…
Nerd mentality
How do you tell a great story? According to Craig Mazin, you have to be a sadist. ‘As a writer,…
Notes on a scandal
Kevin Katke was quite a man. He had no military training, no political background and no espionage experience. Nonetheless, his…
