Category Archives: Uncategorized

At midday, those expecting Ian Payne’s Sunday Review show on Radio 5 Live were thrown into David Morley’s The Crowd, Morley’s tribute to the 96 men, women and children killed by the crush at a Liverpool versus Nottingham Forest match in 1989. This sickening tragedy looms large again, as the Hillsborough Independent Panel has nowContinue reading “You’ll never walk alone – David Morley’s The Crowd”

An officer, fresh from Helmand, played us the mobile phone footage: the excited chatter and the puny rifle cracks were alien to someone steeped in the tidy narratives and the high fidelity sound of the war film. Suddenly, the hillside erupted to a soundtrack of irrepressible obscenity. In Oxfordshire, this unbridled joy was shocking to witnessContinue reading “Insult to Injury – Simon Armitage’s The Not Dead”

When I took my wife’s call, I thought she was trapped in the wreckage of a car. Her brain was wired to the pain and nothing was making sense. She was, in fact, on our bedroom floor and, minutes later, we were in A & E where we were told that all was well andContinue reading “The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering – Olivia Byard’s Strange Horses”

Donkeys were still hitched to lamp-posts in County Limerick in the ’80s and our village was the sort of place where everyone knew everyone else’s business. Yet, despite the lashings of craic (in addition to the seven public houses on the High Street, the ironmonger’s was a spit and sawdust boozer after hours), the village’sContinue reading “No Gypsy Wedding – David Morley’s The Invisible Kings”

The strangest thing I’ve kissed is a section of stomach lining belonging to the Blessed Ralph Sherwin. He’s an old boy of the Venerable English College, Rome, where I spent a misguided few months training to be a priest. Ralph’s grey, desiccated membrane is sandwiched between a couple of sheets of glass and enshrined in RococoContinue reading “Kissing a Saint’s Stomach Lining – Adam Thorpe’s Voluntary”

In the family album there’s a snap of a tiny boy pressing his gift of a Matchbox car into the romper-suited torso of his new baby brother. The picture appears to wear the cool halo of Instagram chic but it doesn’t; it’s just from the 1970s when, believe it or not, all photos had aContinue reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Matthew Stewart’s Inventing Truth”

Buy On Poetry from Oberon Books A school friend grasped counterpoint intuitively and had a penchant for writing fugues. He wrote many, won a national award and was invited to a London concert hall to perform, whereas I had a rudimentary grasp of harmony and realised that my GCSE composition folder was thin. Over anContinue reading “Looking at the emperor’s new clothes – Glyn Maxwell’s On Poetry”

Buy The World’s Two Smallest Humans from Faber When I saw Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo (1999) dwarfed by Trafalgar Square’s scale and chutzpah, it took my breath away. Wallinger’s figure, modelled at life-size, was lost amongst the great and good of the British Empire. Even Jesus Christ, bound, scourged and crowned with thorns, Wallinger seems to say, will beContinue reading “Ecce Homo – Julia Copus’ The World’s Two Smallest Humans”

Buy The Laughter of Mothers from Harvill Secker As the car turned off Bachelors Walk and onto O’Connell Street, my brother and I would lurch chimp-like in our seats for a glimpse of the angel with a hole in her tit. She sits at the foot of the O’Connell Monument and was damaged by gunfireContinue reading “The Nightmare of History – Paul Durcan’s The Laughter of Mothers”

Buy Me and the Dead from Salt To live on a narrowboat is to live in a world of either slack or taut ropes. In the downpour, as the river’s level spikes, I looked out the window at the mooring ropes straining against the pontoon, wondering when to slacken off, when to let the boatContinue reading “Lingerie in London – Me and the Dead by Katy Evans-Bush”