Warning: The paragraphs on Great Expectations contain SPOILERS. Three months into the BBC’s Dickens Season it does not seem to have ended, with several Dickensian offerings still knocking around on i...
The following was written for a job application, answering the task of analysing a recent TV drama (focusing on writing). I went for the opening of the new series of Desperate Housewives (going by th...
Firstly, a sorry and a thank you. A sorry for the two-week gap in posts and a thank you to the overwhelming response I had to my post on Elly Nowell and Oxford University. It seemed to go a bit viral...
Ok, so today’s big sort of silly news story is about a girl named Elly Nowell who sent a rejection letter to Magdalen College, Oxford. The letter has been a popular internet meme for a couple of days...
Wait, wait! Oh, damnit, 2012 already started didn’t it. Oh well, I promised a third things of the year list in December and until now I’ve been too busy to write one. These are a cluster of things fo...
In my Music of the Year post I promised two more something-of-the-year articles. This is the first – the top TV of the year, a list that hangs in that deep blogosphere valley somewhere between the tw...
I don't really know what this is either. Earlier in the week on The Drive-in Bingo, I reviewed the first bit of flagship output from the BBC’s Dickens Season, the underwhelming The Bleak Old Sho...
Few TV writers can feel as lucky, professionally speaking, as the author of The Bleak Old Shop of Stuff, Mark Evans. Evans, who quilled Radio 4’s Bleak Expectations, was an obvious choice for a BBC2 ...
Commodore Record Shop, New York, 1947 December is the season of three things: Christmas, bloggers making lists of stuff they like and bloggers complaining about other bloggers making lists of stuff t...
Hello! Thought I’d post a quick update to say two things: . 1) This blog is now 1 year old! Whoo! I uploaded my first blog post on December 10th 2010, a smidgen under 1 year ago today. Since then I’...
I’ve spent the last three years writing essays as a university undergraduate. Every fortnight on this blog I’ll be burning off a little bit of that stock-pile, those bits and pieces that might intere...
Mark Watson’s Live Address to the Nation – BBC Radio 4 The second in a series I’ve just caught up with, Mark Watson along with Tim Key and Tom Basden examine one big topic each episode. Their theme t...
Billy Bragg in THE PAST The topic of political music has resurfaced in the national press recently, with articles in all sorts of places (I linked to the best one by Chris T-T on this blog a couple o...
Where I recommend the best things I’ve read/watched/heard elsewhere on the Internet each week. Judging by my stats page, these posts can attract a lot of hits but readers like them to be broad in the...
The new feature where I list the best thing’s I’ve read or heard on the world wide web each week. This week: lots of political satire and some (I expect rather prescient) guidance for Angry Birds: Th...
Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Marriage Plot and Channel 4’s new sitcom Fresh Meat have become two of the season’s hottest cultural talking points, both touted as accurate, emersing depictions of the ...
This week’s Follow Friday is slightly different to last week’s. I’m still playing around, seeing what sort of things people want me to list and I haven’t had so much time to browse a lot of blogs or ...
I’ve spent the last three years writing essays. Every fortnight on this blog I’ll be burning off a little bit of that stock-pile, those bits and pieces that might interest the general or ...
Welcome to a new feature I’m trying out for a few weeks on The Drive-in Bingo, Follow Friday, where I list the best handful of things I’ve seen or heard or read on the Internet during the...
I’ve already written a lot about the Edinburgh Fringe. More specifically I’ve reviewed about twenty odd shows for the website Broadway Baby. I also tweeted incessantly, reviewing every show I saw (on...
Photography by artist David Owen, which accompanies and features in documentary film The Way of the Morris (see below). As the hottest October on record scorches its way across England and Wales one ...
Just across town, down the road and over the hill from where I live is a village called North Nibley. It is a quiet village but, in its own way, quite vibrant. It’s not the sort of village, like many...
P J Harvey, by some rocks. As many readers will have seen, the nominations for the 2011 Mercury Prize were announced earlier today. There are some interesting shouts, the real music lover’s favourite...
By now, most British readers wired enough to be browsing onto the backwaters of the blogosphere, where this ramshackle hermit’s cottage I arrogantly call a blog is to be found, will have seen what ha...
Howdy,* So, Internet, this is awkward, I say I’ll pop by every couple of weeks and then six speed past and I don’t so much as send you a postcard. I thought I could slip in a blog post every couple o...
I like pop culture articles with a socio-political edge and this was my attempt at writing some lighter, more diverse coverage that was still inkeeping with the current affairs slant of the Comment s...
This term I was a features writer for my student newspaper, The Oxford Student. It was my last term on the paper after almost exactly two years working for them. Having written mostly for the music s...
My favourite song is a ballad named ‘The Parting Glass’. There are many reasons to think it is the best song written in English: its quietness, subtlety and delicacy are chief amongst them. The crux ...
In my continuing endeavour to use up unpublished work, below is an article I wrote last summer for the Oxford University History Society’s magazine. I wrote two articles at the time; this one w...
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