Not long back from New York and the trip of a lifetime. I need to get back into my writing routine but it has taken a few days to shake off a beguiling feeling of unreality. I left A Dish of Apricots in the middle of an important discourse on different coloured jelly babies. I…

Avignon, France This was a difficult choice. My adopted home town of Lincoln has, arguably, the finest cathedral in England. The majesty of London and Rome, and the romance of Paris are well-documented. Venice is uniquely astounding. Walking down the steps to catch the water bus on the Grand Canal and first walking into St…

The Crown [Series 3] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I was saving this one up for the dank days between Christmas and New Year when the schedulers have given up and padded out the listings with pap, dreck, drivel, twaddle and rot – and repeats of the aforesaid pap, dreck, drivel, twaddle and rot. As soon as this series…

The King [Netflix – released 2019] ⭐️⭐️ The King is as sludgy a mess as the mud-wrestling Battle of Agincourt it portrays. Its attemt to force contemporary political ishoos into a fifteenth-century chronicle leads to embarrassing plot and language clangs. At one moment we have high rhetoric and moments after references to ‘regime change’. I…

‘For I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it. I will have it all mine.’                                                                   …

I DON”T REALLY SIT ABOUT twiddling my thumbs, you know. When one book is finished, I am immediately off again with another. Actually, it’s not as simple as that and in fact there is often a considerable overlap. The last full stop of the first draft is a cause for celebration and a glass or…

The pronoun ‘me’ underscores the debate at the core of the novel about the benefits and dangers of Artificial Intelligence, a debate which becomes quite cerebral at times. We are invited to reflect on a taxing question: when does sentience become cognition and, when cognition evolves an identity – ‘me’ – does a robot become…

No. I’m not offering advice or therapy so don’t ask. I’m talking about the Netflix series, Sex Education, which is far and away the best thing I’ve seen on the idiot box for a very long time. Otis, a sixth-former, has a problem with masturbation: he cannot bring himself to a climax. He surmises that…

Humphrey and the Squirrel is a prequel to Ian Thomson’s successful novel, Humphrey and Jack. Humphrey does battle with his nosy neighbour, Mrs Bellingham – with Aristotle the cat – and with a malicious squirrel – each of whom is a threat to his beloved garden birds. You could read the story as a taster…