my vedana

There's a hypnotic, meditative quality to Perfect Days which foregrounds the Koji Yakusho character's quiet immersion in simple eve...

My reading habit is almost as bad as my writing habit. In fact it may be worse. It costs more for a start and it has the added disadvantage ...

Scribbled notes on a scrap of lined paper sold for £89,000 the other day. They were the draft lyrics for Rock n Roll Suicide and Suffragette...

  Perhaps Martin Scorsese is playing with conventions, but 3 hrs 26 mins sounds like a very long movie. Killers of the Flower Moon is that ...

  For the cover of Why Writing Still Matters I wanted an image that conveyed some of the messages that are to be found in the book - and th...

In Why Writing Still Matters I spend some time tracing the invention and development of paper as a writing technology, but not with the det...

My new book Why Writing Still Matters was published by Cambridge University Press last week. I haven't actually seen a copy yet - distr...

I read The Memory Police about a year ago and I thought it was so good that I should post something about it. I put the book down on the de...

When my mother died, I couldn't work out what to do with the desk she had. It was rather like the one here, and it had been part of the ...

I remember a time when writing with a fountain pen was something to aspire to. Yes, the fountain pen with its little metal lever, delicately...

Helping us to reflect on our particular position in the wider sweep of social and cultural life is something that literature does well. I do...

You could imagine a particular kind writing workshop. There's an assignment: sketch out a story set on an island. Have two main characte...

In one way or another a work of fiction is always subject to the gravitational pull of the time in which it is made. Whether we're think...

The passenger sees the world from a particular point of view. Separate, like a spectator, a world unfolds through the frame of the window. T...

In the study of writing we often overlook the fact that the most commonly spoken language in the world is Chinese. Using characters - a form...

The public library was an important landmark in my childhood. It was in safe cycling distance, it was always warm, and it was the context fo...

If you'd told me that the novel I was about to read contained over 60 pages of Powerpoint slides using some of the standard insert graph...

It's been a while. Perhaps it seems as if I'm a blogger on a go-slow, but really it's just the sign of a changing relationship w...

I've come to think of all work as work in progress. A busy couple of months have seen me mulling over what things in the literacy world ...

The Pinterest algorithm got to know me pretty quickly. I'm not sure if it knows when and where I was born but it must be narrowing it do...