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From Twitter , and not a crash blossom for once, this is just a bit....well, see for yourself: It definitely has a bit of a Day Today...

Two motivational celebrity quotes for you today. The first is from the great Bill Hicks, whose views on the desirability of exciting and div...

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Madeleine Hanna is a student at Brown University in the early 1980s, studying English literatu...

The other point I was going to make in the last book review is that Jonathan Coe is one of those people who write broadly "literary...

Middle England by Jonathan Coe. There is, I think, a reasonably convincing argument that there was a moment in 2010 when the UK's r...

My younger daughter Alys' cuddly pig, which she calls Piggy but I call Alf, for reasons which are entirely mysterious to her (and may be...

The guy from Grant Wood's iconic painting American Gothic , who is supposed to represent some sort of archetypal Iowan farming type but ...

Dr. Bloodmoney by Philip K Dick. I dunno, you wait ages for a planet-scouring apocalypse and then two come along in successive book rev...

It's noodle-ordering time again, and I notice on a quick trawl back through noodle-related posts that I did a table a while back detai...

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace. We're in North America, probably a few hundred years in the future. Seasoned speculative fiction reader...

A quick follow-up to my last post in which I controversially claim that vast swathes of Eastern England do not exist - here is a very unsci...

I went to Northampton the day before New Year's Eve. Nothing so very remarkable about that, you might say, but you'd be wrong, for a...

The Folks That Live On The Hill by Kingsley Amis. Harry Caldecote has basically done all right for himself, in a low-key sort of way. A...

The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck. O-OOOOOOH-KLAHOMA where the wind comes sweeping down the plain Where the wavin' wheat can ...

I spotted this on Twitter earlier today: This turns out to be from 2014, but I imagine the principal protagonist (who is from Taipei...

Well, it looks like the honeymoon period is over for our kitchen light bulbs. Hot (or rather non-incandescently cool) on the heels of bulb n...