A good many actors refuse to read notices in the press about their performances. I suppose it’s hardly surprising that members of a profession, whose business is the expression and manipulation of emotions, are highly sensitive to criticism, whether fair or unfair. After all, they have dared to submit their inner selves to public exposure…

Coincidences  by Ian Thomson There was a boy in my form at school with the same name as me. Exactly the same name. There was no intrusive ‘p’ in Thomson. He was called ‘Ian’ like me, not ‘Iain’ or ‘Eoin’ or any other exotic variant. Neither of us had a middle name. Quite simply, we…

Michael Reidy’s The Rock Pool is suffused with nostalgia, the aching remembrance of rose-tinted, irrecoverable time, the bitter-sweet longing for a return home. ‘Home’ in the novel is not that of the narrator, Nick Lucas, but the beach house at Fulmar Point of his friend, Jack Amiche, his two sisters and their parents, where Nick…

PART ONE I enjoyed the first instalment of the 2007 version of Oliver Twist this evening. BBC Drama at its best. Sumptuous production values. A brilliant adaptation: the screenplay artfully excises padding from Dickens’ text, simplifies some of its unnecessary subplots and excursions, and even adds some clever interludes of dialogue wholly consonant with Dickens’…

en years or so ago, Fiskerton made his first appearance on Facebook. Now,it is a truth universally acknowledged that a gentleman, living alone, must be in need of a valet-cum-butler, so I invented one for myself. Fiskerton was canny, diligent and discreet and I would have him mix me a Pimm’s, lay out my dinner…

All is True Bill Bryson pointed out that we know very little about Shakespeare’s life and if you look back through the excellent work of Peter Ackroyd, Ivor Brown, Dr Johnson and Evelyn’s gossipy diaries, that remains much the case. So can you make it all up? Can you fill a film about Shakespeare’s (known)…

I like short stories. It’s a mystery to me why some publishers have such a downer on them. It seems that they are not happy to countenance publishing a collection unless the author has already published at least one successful novel. I find that odd because there must surely be a market for them out…

A good day at the keyboard. My fourth novel, A Dish of Apricots, has definitely moved into the endgame. Here’s an idea of what’s to come: Philip Williams is the Catastrophe Kid. If anything can go wrong in his life, it will. Calamity follows calamity until he begins to believe that his life is ruled…

The Breakfast Club [Netflix] ⭐️⭐️⭐️ Teen flics are not usually my bag (apart from the inimitable Sex Education). I really thought this was going to be an exception. Five high school types, a jock, a prom queen, a nerd, a wildly unpredictable proto-goth, and an anarchical rebel are thrown together in a Saturday detention. They…

Humphrey sat on the garden swing with the green pistol in one hand and the red pistol in the other. A large King Edward potato lay in his lap. He sat there patiently, quite motionless. After an age, the squirrel came scampering up the steps from the lawn and onto his terrace. Pigeons waddled and…