Words Dept.: category

It’s the last day of the year, so here are my top several things of 2010. I haven’t bothered to create an artificial five or ten of everything, partly because my consumption of cultural artefacts doesn’t really merit it and partly because I like to keep it fresh and unpredictable, like a game of snooker [...]

As I’ve nothing better to do and 2008 has now definitely finished, I thought I’d provide you with my list of my favourite things from the year just gone. Happy New Year, by the way. Film I thought Wall-E was surprisingly deep for a kids film and was also technically flawless. But There Will Be [...]

I was intrigued to see in the promo promoting the forthcoming BBC drama schedule (you know, the one with Elbow singing in the background) that Kenneth Branagh is starring as Kurt Wallander in an adaptation of the Henning Mankell books. I recently discovered the joys of Scandanavian crime fiction, which is a generally magnificent and [...]

Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, which was launched last November, appears to be undergoing what might be called a soft relaunch with the help of the Guardian. Apparently, nobody likes the expensive, horrible-looking gadget but it’s rated as Bloody Great by, er, Amazon. According to the paper’s report from the US BookExpo trade fair, Amazon CEO [...]

Happy New Year to all 14 of my unique visitors! The beginning of 2008 is a chance to reflect on the fact that in the six months that I’ve been writing this blog, virtually no-one has read it. Despite my transparent attempts to build traffic by baiting Andrew Gilligan (which did, at least, result in [...]

Yes, you read it right. A character in a fictional children’s story has been outed as gay by the author of said book. For those of us who don’t know what gay is, the Observer helpfully suggests who it thinks are the three most heterosexual men in the world in order to help us visualise. [...]