"No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe" wrote Donne. Well, Mike Tomkies tried his damnedest. Tomkies's books sold in their thousands in the 1980s, but in today's Nature Writing Revival he is nowhere to be found. Both my Dad and cousin Colin (with whom I went birdwatching in my teens, chugging around Fife … Continue reading Mike Tomkies: Wilderness(e) man
I had thought about compiling a ranking of Neil Gaiman's Sandman books in the manner of my previous (and gratifyingly popular) China Mieville and Clive Barker top 10s. But if you don't know Sandman, although they can be read as stand-alone volumes, you'll get more out of them if you read them in order. So … Continue reading A completely unnecessary piece on Neil Gaiman’s “The Sandman”
Nothing dates like a vision of the future. I was in Brussels recently for a family holiday. Lovely city; highly recommended. Anyway: we visited the Atomium. You might not know the name, but you know the image: "the steel balls". As a piece of architecture, from afar it looks like a toy; one of the … Continue reading Brussels Expo58
Into the Gyre 