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Couple of follow-ups to previous posts: I was struck by an arresting phrase on page 132 of The Piano Teacher , during one of Erika's t...

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek. Erika Kohut is the piano teacher of the book's title, tutoring and mentoring a group of stud...

So, Brexit, then. And while it's awfully tempting to dismiss the 52% of the UK population who voted to leave the European Union as just ...

Home by Marilynne Robinson. The "home" in question is the Gilead, Iowa home of Robert Boughton, former Presbyterian minister. ...

Quick follow-up on yesterday's religious conversion thing - as always I am surfing the bleeding edge of the Zeitgeist, as the appearan...

It's a bit of a trope in the atheist movement to share stories of how you, the free-thinking rational atheist person, came to throw off ...

The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting by Milan Kundera. Before we go any further here, one should pause to ask: what exactly is a novel? ...

Nice to see that in addition to the Daily Mail the list of people monitoring this blog for ideas includes BBC Four, who evidently decided t...

Your very own Won't Get Fooled Again in the early stages of Channel 5's  The Best of Bad TV: The 70s . You can pretty much imagine ...

A couple of religion-related stories in the news around Easter (so a few weeks ago now, but y'know, sue me, I've been busy), occupyi...

As a further tribute to Prince , here's a two-item music list for you: songs which start, do the basic tune for a bit, then have a sort ...

As I said at the time of the deaths of David Bowie and Glenn Frey earlier in 2016 (a year which statistically is exceptionally celebrity-d...

Ragtime by EL Doctorow. It's New York City (and its environs) in the first decade-and-a-half of the 20th century - so if there were ...

Here's a curious coincidence: no sooner do I speculate on the relative merits of furious spin-bike training and furious self-abuse tha...

It's time to address the sensitive subject of my weight. No, no, don't try to fob me off with all that "weight? are you mad?...