Mind & body.

This is quite the show Billington, Purves, Letts and several others have noted. I only note that the musicals (both the Cole Porter show and the cod Broadway show he invents and parodies) are all the more beautiful because they take us closer to the sexual politics which Shakespeare's Shrew look at. Read more...

I have been nurturing an odd impression that I might really like comics, but it's not one I am giving in to. That is: I haven't gone out and bought any Incredible Hulk or V for Vendetta comics. I haven't even investigated print copies of Maus.  But I do know the force of the genre: as a nine year-old I ran a prep school dorm's library of 64-page war comics, and I get little hits of those pleasures now. This movie gave me a huge blast. Read more...

Egged on by The Times's item on Flickr, "At Home With the Queen", I have posted this little snap of me and the 1977 Silver Jubilee poster which I made with the artist and printer Ann Brunskill. Details from the poster are here. Read more...

The great thing is to go forth and get hold of the books of this very great middle to low brow writer of adventure romances, and read them. If this piece delays you in doing so, then ignore it. If it is what may push you into the Shute fan club, then please read on... Read more...

I would love to pose the question: Is Rosamond Lehmann the best of the mid-20th Century female novelists? I am nowhere near well-enough-read to opine very certainly. I am thinking of the world before Iris Murdoch (my mother's favourite during the 1950s and 1960s) and Muriel Spark (whose books I loved in the 1970s). Lehmann's core competition comes from Stella Gibbons, Betty Miller, Jean Rhys,  Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Bowen. Viriginia Wolf ought to be in there, but perhaps the point is that Lehmann and the others are middlebrow and Woolf's highbrow competition doesn't count. Read more...

In 1977, Ann Brunskill of the World's End Press kindly held my hand in producing a poster for the Queen's Silver Jubilee. It was made with wooden and metal letters and the zillions of ornaments she had to hand in a Thameside studio, and printed on hairy paper (now a bit damaged). Here are three details from the work. Read more...

Ian Hislop very nearly told us (When Bankers Were Good, BBC2) that Dickensian bankers were more moral than our own. A couple of literati on the Today show  (BBC Radio 4, 7 December 2011) did actually say how awful and Dickensian our times are. (The inequality! The homeless!) So which is it? Read more...

We are routinely said to have "lost a decade" and that the loss is unrecoverable. I have no idea what this means. Read more...

Max Mosley seems to have swept all before him and does so because his case pushes into so many corners of the matters Leveson is considering. Pace the rather silly remarks by Hugo Rifkind in  The Times (25 November 2011) it is important that we don't wrongly calibrate the media's offences. Read more...

In recent episodes of  BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme there have been interesting examples of - and some challenges to - the show's dogma. I think it is fair to say the show is crusading for something it calls "real food". But what is that? Read more...